A Bradford teen was reunited with her father Friday after a
three year search and a bit of peculiar circumstances that came to
a head earlier this year.
Jaqueline Steier was passing time playing KerPlunk! with her
niece at Emanuel Lutheran Church Friday when she was tapped on her
back by Wayne Steier.
She turned, smiled, said hello before she realized she was
looking at her father.
With her eyes growing wide, mouth dropping open and hands flying
up to her face she said, “Oh my gosh!”
Then she buried her face in her hands and wouldn’t look up.
When she did, she put head back down a few times before standing
and hugging her father.
Her mother, Marilyn Ortega, explained that it was truly a
surprise for her daughter.
“She knew he was coming up – she was getting suspicious, so I
had to give her a date,” said Ortega. “She thought he was coming
Monday.”
“Then she wanted to be outside this afternoon and I talked her
into playing a game,” she added, explaining how she was able to
pull off the surprise visit from Wayne Steier, who lives in Port
Richey, Fla.
The two had actually planned to have the elder Steier go to
Fretz Middle School at the time Jaqueline was to get out of classes
to surprise her there. But Steier had to travel from Bloomsburg,
where he had been visiting his other children, and apparently had
gotten off the beaten path on his way.
It didn’t matter to Jaqueline how she was surprised, she beamed
from ear to ear and kept stealing glances at her father as he
talked to a reporter. He would turn to pinch her or chat for a
second or two during the interview.
Talking about Jaqueline’s half brothers and sisters, Wayne
Steier said he couldn’t wait to take her to meet them.
“They have so much in common, it’s freaky,” he said.
The two will spend a week together in Bradford and will then
travel together to Bloomsburg to see her half brothers and
sisters.
The events that brought the two together after a three-year
unplanned separation involve a visit to e-mail trash, a trip to a
Web page that is on a hidden cache memory and a terrific desire by
Wayne Steier to find his daughter.
A Web page designed by Fretz Spanish teacher Karen Rathgeber
held information for a World Language Festival held in her class.
Within that information was Jaqueline’s first name and some recipes
for her mother’s Cuban cooking.
Wayne Steier somehow landed on that cached page and thought he
would write the teacher asking her if Jaqueline’s last name was
Steier and saying that she may be his daughter. He told her he
wanted to contact her.
Rathgeber said she found the e-mail in her trash – a place she
doesn’t often visit.
Rathgeber said she wasn’t sure it was a good idea to tell either
Jaqueline or Ortega, and almost threw the e-mail away and pretended
to not know anything about it, but after talking with Fretz
Principal Tina Slaven, decided to contact Ortega anyway.
As it turned out, the two Steiers had been looking for each
other for three years.
Ortega explained the separation began when she decided to move
from Florida to Pennsylvania. Before they did, they attempted to
contact Wayne Steier, who was out of town at the time. They
couldn’t reach him, but left information with others they thought
would get the message to him. That system failed.
Since then, the two had been looking for each other until that
February e-mail.
