In October 1976, Victoria Rohring was newly divorced and waiting for her children to come home after several months away when she received a mysterious call saying they had died in a car crash.
“I was distraught and said, ‘Well, where did this accident happen?’ ” Rohring, 63, told NBC’s “Today” show. “Click went the phone.”
She said couldn’t track down her ex-husband, Jimmy Black, who was said to be critically injured in the crash, or any information from the police or later a private investigator about her children, Karen, 8, and Scott, 5.
Karen and Scott were raised by their father in New Jersey. They said on NBC this morning that their father told them their mother abandoned them and gave conflicting stories about her, though Rohring was living about six hours away in Rochester, N.Y.
Karen Cason and Scott Black’s nearly lifelong separation from their mother ended in July when a friend helped them find her. They first spoke over the phone.
“I felt like this void, this emptiness I had in my heart, just filled up instantly,” said Rohring, eyes tearing during the interview. Her daughter added: “I just had so much I wanted to say, so much I wanted to hear from her.”
Rohring drove to Georgia, where her children live. Their joyous reunion began before she could even get out of her car.
“My daughter and my son came running over to the car, opened up the door and hugged me,” she told NBC. “I wrapped my arms around them. Just being able to hug my daughter and my son was a dream come true.”
Jimmy Black told a “Today” producer off camera that Rohring never called him after their divorce to ask for their children back and that he did not know about the phone call about a fatal car crash.
Pressed on “Today” to explain why the children couldn’t be found, Rohring said police in New Jersey told her it was a matter for family court and was told that without the children, she couldn’t pursue a family court case.
During their childhood, Cason said, her father told them different stories about their mother. She said her father would say: ” ‘I told your mom you were dead. She’s in the Army. She’s in the Peace Corps.’ His story always changed.”
“He said, ‘She didn’t want you. She dumped you on my doorstep,’ ” Cason said.
Scott Black said each parent has a version of what happened.
“And I have to give her the benefit of the doubt,” he said. “I have to try to give him the benefit of the doubt.
“But when she tells me the story … it always seems to be the same,” he said of his mother. “Over the past 30 years when I asked him the story, it always changed.”
The younger Black said his wife doesn’t understand why he allows his father to rent a room in his house, even after finding his mother.
“No matter what, he’s still going to be my father,” Black said, adding that his father is on a fixed income. “He’s a person. I can’t put him out on the street with no place to go.”
Rohring said though it was devastating not being able to say goodbye to her children, she felt “in her heart” that they were still alive.
“I will never, never lose my children again,” she said. ” Never.”
(via aol.com)
