After decades apart, woman finds mom — homeless in Orlando

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OrlandoSentinel.com
Happy reunion

Jessica Wisnoski and Lani Burgos are reunited after Wisnoski spent $20,000 and decades searching for the mother she hadn’t seen since she was a toddler.

Susan Jacobson

Sentinel Staff Writer

July 20, 2009

For nearly four decades, all Jessica Wisnoski had to remember her mother was a tattered photo of 2-year-old Wisnoski sitting in her mom’s lap.

The yearning to know her mother never left Wisnoski, 38, who lives near Houston. She and her husband, Bryan, spent $20,000 and 17 years searching for Lani Burgos, 58, who left her only child with Burgos’ father and stepmother while she tried to kick a drug habit.

On Saturday night, Wisnoski finally found her mom — homeless and living in Orlando.

After years of dashed hopes and false leads, the Wisnoskis, with the help of a private investigator, tracked Burgos to a Salvation Army shelter in Ocala and, from there, to Central Florida.

During the weekend, they drove to Orlando, where they planned to hand out fliers offering a reward for helping them find Burgos. On the way to the Coalition for the Homeless of Central Florida, they stumbled on police Officer Jonathan Adkins. He offered to drive them.

No luck at the shelter. So, Adkins took the couple to other hangouts for the homeless, including Lake Lucerne, where transients said they had seen Burgos at free meals downtown, Adkins said.

Armed with a jail booking photo — Burgos has been arrested a couple of times on open-container and illegal-camping charges — they swung by the Interstate 4/ East-West Expressway underpass. There, a woman sat on the sidewalk.

“I said, ‘Oh, my gosh, I think that’s her,’” Wisnoski recalled.

Adkins checked it out.

“Are you Lani Burgos?” he asked. “How are you doing?”