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Gina M. Garcia is a member of a different 1 percent club: kidnapped kids returned to their families.
In 1981, when she was 8 years old, Garcia — a tomboy who loved baseball — was nabbed from a mall in Orlando, Fla.
“I remember a Lionel Playworld across the street. It had a kangaroo mascot that I looked at the entire time I was being sexually assaulted,” she told The Post. Her kidnapper was driving off with her when another car ran a stop sign — forcing the man to brake and giving Garcia an escape.
As devastating as the experience was, it would take some 25 years for Garcia to comprehend the truth.
That’s because a police detective instructed her parents not to discuss what had happened with Garcia. “Nobody wanted to talk about it, so I didn’t bring it up,” she said.
But all the while, it was secretly eating away at her soul — and would eventually consume her to the point that she couldn’t live day to day.
Once she finally started digging for the truth, she made a shocking discovery: As an attorney pointed out to her, her case has remarkable similarities to one of the most infamous child-kidnapping cases of the past 40 years — that of 6-year-old Adam Walsh, the murdered son of “America’s Most Wanted” TV host John Walsh. Even John Walsh himself believes the same sick man nabbed Garcia and Adam.
“It’s very similar. There are so many parallels,” Walsh told The Post. “Her case is so much like [Adam’s].”
Now, with the guidance of her mentor, “Wonder Woman” director Patty Jenkins, Garcia has made a film about her experience. “Untold: This Is My Story” premieres in Los Angeles on Sept. 6 at the Dances With Films Festival.
As only 1 percent of kidnapped children actually make it home, Garcia knows how lucky she is: “Statistically speaking, I shouldn’t be alive.”
Garcia grew up in a military family. Her dad, Charlie, was a combat pilot from Puerto Rico who flew more than 100 missions into enemy territory under the guise of Air America, a division of the CIA. Her mother was a beauty queen whose own father, a World War II prisoner of war, received a Purple Heart. Gina was born while her dad was stationed in Tehran, Iran, but the family — including her two older sisters and a brother — fled the country in 1978 ahead of the Islamic revolution.
They eventually settled in Florida, where, on the evening of Oct. 12, 1981, Garcia had a “girls’ night” with her mom and sister at the Orlando Fashion Square Mall. While their mother paid a bill at Sears, Gina, 8, and her 18-year-old sibling hung out at a bookstore. They were all supposed to meet up at Orange Julius for a sweet treat later. But as her sister browsed, a man approached Gina.
“He bumped into my butt while I was sitting on the floor,” said Garcia, who was working on a science project. He flashed a badge, told her that he was with security and that he had some books on Saturn in his car. “I followed him because I wanted to get a good grade,” Garcia recalled. “There was no screaming or yelling.”
Things turned when they reached the car. “He went from nice guy to a monster,” she said. The man shoved her inside and, knife held to her small body, raped her.
He was driving her out of the parking lot when Garcia was able to leap out of the car. Pants down and barefoot, she ran back into the mall and found her sister, who hadn’t even realized the girl was missing. Security paged their mom and the police were alerted.
A rape kit detected semen and police found a stolen car with the attacker’s hat, but “they threw it all out,” said Garcia. Although a police report was filed, cops told her parents to just be grateful she was alive. “They were more concerned with returning the stolen car than they were with a proper investigation,” Garcia said.
A spokesperson for the Orlando Police Department told The Post, “The records ... show that in October of 1981, an investigation was conducted utilizing all available resources at the time. On Oct. 26, 1981, the detective assigned to Gina Garcia’s case designated this investigation as ‘inactive,’ pending the surfacing of any new evidence and/or leads.”
Garcia went to sleep that night in the bunk beds she shared with her brother, Michael, and missed a couple of days of school.
“I came home, there was no story. It’s not like how it is today,” said Garcia. “My mom was going to take [the truth] to the grave. I blacked out the assault.”
At first it seemed OK. Garcia was the host of her elementary school’s news show. Later she was voted Student Council president and played multiple sports in high school. But beneath her veneer, there were cracks.
She was secretly coming to grips with her homosexuality, after a secret freshman-year affair with her male basketball coach. She also had undiagnosed dyslexia, which led to her dropping out of high school. After getting her GED and landing a softball scholarship at Seminole College, Garcia dropped out there, too.
“Any time I was pulling ahead, I would self-destruct,” she said. “I would do things unintentionally to destroy myself.”
Romantic relationships always seemed to be doomed — “I couldn’t look someone in the eye,” she recalled — and she struggled with weight issues. Being heavy, she said, was “a way to protect myself. I wanted to kind of be invisible.”
Garcia joined the Navy and, as a petty officer, was assigned to NATO — earning high-level clearance working in computer logistics and weapons tracking for submarines.
She left the military as a disabled vet due to a sports injury at 23 and opened a bicycle shop in Orlando. But when the business was plagued with a string of break-ins, Garcia had a surprise reaction: a wave of debilitating flashbacks from her childhood trauma.
“I literally thought I was going crazy. I couldn’t get off the couch, I couldn’t function. I kept seeing this face,” she said, adding that she was hit by phantom smells and tastes, too. “I thought I was losing my mind. But it had nothing to with the break-ins — and everything to do with the abduction.”
She only remembered the assault in 2006 with the help of a therapist. “I knew I was taken from a bookstore but ... I literally blocked everything out,” she said.
In 2008 at age 36, Garcia looked at her police report for the first time, thanks to a friend who was an attorney for the City of Orlando.
“The answers of what happened to me, I read from my 8-year-old self,” she said.
But when her attorney friend read the file, she gasped: “Oh my God, your [case] is just like Adam Walsh’s.”
Adam was 6 years old when he was abducted from a Hollywood, Fla., mall on July 27, 1981 — less than three months before Garcia was taken. After a two-week search that garnered nationwide attention, a fisherman discovered the boy’s severed head in a canal between Hollywood and Orlando, where Garcia would later be kidnapped.
Garcia said that, like Adam, “I was sodomized. [The attacker] thought I was a little boy. I was a little tomboy. The only difference is, someone ran a stop sign, my abductor hit the brakes — and I got out.”
She refuses to dwell on the identity of her attacker, but said: “I know with 100 percent certainty I was abducted 2½ months after Adam’s abduction. There are similar behaviors.”
Adam’s father, John Walsh, become an outspoken advocate for missing children and the host of “America’s Most Wanted.” He continued seeking answers in his son’s case for three decades before, in 2008, Hollywood police determined the killer was Ottis Toole, a serial killer who had died in prison in 1996 while serving five life sentences for other homicides.
In 2020 while promoting his show “In Pursuit with John Walsh,” Adam’s father described Toole as a “serial predator who roamed this country for years and grabbed kids all over this country.”
Walsh told The Post: “It sounds logical [that Toole could have kidnapped Garcia]. He was in the area. She was the age he liked.”
Garcia met John Walsh in 2014 and gave him an early cut of her film. His assistant later told her that he quickly turned it off. “I don’t know if it was a trigger for him,” Garcia said. “He didn’t get through that much of the film and I understand why.”
Garcia is now 48 and single, and lives by the Gulf of Mexico in Florida. She is the CEO of Trikaroo, a micro-scooter brand.
She admits that, for a while, she harbored resentment against her family for burying her truth. Her sister — who was supposed to be watching Garcia when she was nabbed — left home after the abduction. The last time they saw each other was in 2012. “She still hadn’t processed [what happened],” Garcia said.
Her father died in 1995, but today Garcia says her relationships with the rest of the family have never been better.
“I don’t blame the cops for giving my mom bad advice. I don’t blame my sister,” Garcia said. “The only person to blame is the person that took me.”
She created The Untold Project, a charity to help survivors of sexual PTSD trauma safely tell their own stories.
When she decided to turn her life experience into a movie, Garcia turned to her friend and mentor, “Wonder Woman” director Jenkins, whom Gina had met in 2011.
“I asked her to direct my movie,” Garcia said. Jenkins responded, “Absolutely not. You have to tell your story. You need to direct it.” When Garcia argued she wasn’t a director, Jenkins told her: “You will be when you’re done.”
Famed attorney Gloria Allred makes her acting debut in “Untold,” playing a wounded veteran.
“I admire her and her persistence,” Allred told The Post of Garcia, whom she met through Terri Ivens, the “All My Children” actress who plays grown-up Garcia in the film. “So often children don’t have a voice when they’re sexually abused. There’s a trauma in their life for many years afterwards that they’re trying to understand.”
It’s only been since Garcia learned her truth that she can move forward.
“It will be 40 years in October. I can’t stay living in the past,” she said. “I’m in a great space, physically and emotionally. Every day past Oct. 12, 1981, is a success, [because] I’m above the ground.”
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