Salvador Macías: Teenager stolen 16 years ago by woman dressed as nurse in Mexican hospital returned to his parents

A teenager who was kidnapped 16 years ago from the hospital he was born in has been reunited with his parents.

Salvador Macías was taken from a hospital in Mexico by a woman disguised as a nurse, and was discovered in the home of two people he believed to be his real parents during a police raid on the family’s property.

He was later reunited with his biological parents, who had last seen their firstborn son just hours after his birth, before the kidnapping.

“They told me and that indeed it is my son,” his biological mother Rosalía López Martínez told Mexican TV network Canal 10.

According to Mexican newspaper El Informador, the woman who was posing as a nurse at the hospital approached Ms López Martínez and her husband Yacir Macías at the Mexican Social Security Institute 45 Clinic in Guadalajara.

She initially approached the couple and asked if the baby had been fed, later returning to tell Mr Macías that visiting hours were over, before saying she was taking the baby to another room to feed him – and kidnapping him from the facility.

The investigation into the baby’s disappearance appeared to have gone cold, until 2021, when another baby was stolen from a hospital in Mexico’s Jalisco state – prompting the release of e-fit images of what Salvador would look like as a teenager, the Daily Mail reported.

This in turn led to a local resident of Salvador’s new family to contact authorities, reporting that he looked like the e-fit picture that had been released, which prompted a police investigation.

Although authorities recovered Salvador, the people he believed to be his parents had disappeared form the property when authorities arrived, and have not yet been discovered or questioned.