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Rudy Farias, the man who was found outside a Houston church last month after his mother reported him missing eight years ago, spoke to Houston media outlets this week to explain his side of the story.
Houston Police said after Farias was found that their investigation revealed he hadn’t been missing at all, that he’d returned home a day after running away when he was 17 and then went along with his mother’s story that he was still missing.
“She never locked me in or handcuffed me or anything like that,” Farias told KTRK and KRIV in an emotional dual interview. “I had free will to leave. It just felt like brainwashing me. It just kept confusing me, the way she would manipulate me saying, ‘You’re going to get arrested.’”
He said his mother, Janie Santana, “locked me in there pretty much mentally,” that she was the only person he felt he could trust after his half-brother died in a motorcycle accident in 2011, four years before his “disappearance.”
“She was my only parent, the only person I really ever had besides my brother. When I lost my brother, I didn’t have anyone to teach me how to live, or to have confidence or trust in myself. I just depended on my mom all my life.”
It all started, he said, when he got a speeding ticket on his way to work, but he was never able to get her tell him why they were lying about his disappearance.
Faris said Santana would send him to his room and tell him to be quiet whenever family came to the house.
“I would have to listen to my family be happy and cheerful on the other side of a door, and I would be like, ‘I want my family. I want people. I just want communication,’” he said. “It’s like I lived in prison. It’s like I lived in a jail my whole life. I just wanted to be free. I wanted to have my own job. I just wanted to live my life. I just wanted to love somebody, have someone else that would actually love me. I struggled to understand my emotions.”
He denied reports that he had been sexually abused by his mother, saying that his words had been “twisted” into something they weren’t. But, he said, Santana did push boundaries.
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“I used to have to sleep in her bed sometimes,” Farias said. “Boundaries she would push or make me uncomfortable, and I would say ‘Stop,’ and she would say, ‘Why? Why? Why? I didn’t do anything wrong.’”
KTRK reached out to Quanell X, the activist who made the allegations of sexual abuse after speaking with Farias. He said he considers what he heard sexual abuse.
Farias is now living away from his mother and doesn’t want a “normal” relationship with her.
“Not after all of that. Not after everything she did and to be honest, I don’t want one with her,” he said.
“I just want to live my life. I want to have a family, a car, a house. I just want to live my life and be happy,” Farias added.
Farias spoke about what he did during the time he was “missing,” occasionally veering into conspiracy land about colors influencing people. He said on the day he was found, June 29, he had just started walking and finally stopped at a church because it was a place to be happy.
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[Featured image: Rudy Farias in 2015/Texas Center for the Missing]
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