The last time Christine Reed saw her son Brandon Price was outside a Douglas County courtroom eight years ago.

Price’s parents, Reed and father Chris Price, were divorcing, and they were scheduled to have a hearing to determine who was going to take custody of their son.

Reed decided she wasn’t going to the hearing. She didn’t think she had a chance of gaining custody of 13-year-old Brandon. There was a brief hug and a conversation with Brandon, and then she turned and walked away. She ended up leaving Lawrence.

“I was the one who left,” Reed said during a recent interview. “I basically broke down. It wasn’t pretty at all.”

But neither mother nor son had any idea they would not see or hear from each other for years.

“For a couple of years I went to the mailbox every day to look for a letter from my mom, especially around Christmas,” Brandon Price, now 21, said recently.

He was always disappointed.

On a Saturday evening last month, mother and son reunited, even if it was only by telephone.

After returning from the war in Iraq, veteran Brandon Price, Lawrence, has experienced many hardships in adjusting to civilian life. In the last few months Price has found a job landscaping, sought help for substance abuse and reconnected with his birth mother, Christine Reed of Portland, Ore., whom he has not seen in eight years.

“The first thing I said to him was ‘I love you, I love you, I love you,'” Reed said.

Tough times

Reed is a maintenance supervisor at an apartment complex in Portland, Ore.

“I went through a lot of bad jobs until I came here,” she said. “I had some tough times and I had to get straightened out.”

Unknown to Reed, her son also went through some tough times in recent years. Brandon Price joined the Army Reserves and was deployed to Iraq in 2004. He developed problems with alcohol and drugs. Those problems caused him to be sent back to the U.S. from Iraq where he underwent treatment through the Army until he received an honorable medical discharge in 2005.

Alcohol problems continued to plague Brandon Price after he left the Army and returned to Lawrence. He also showed signs of post-traumatic stress disorder. And because he didn’t finish his deployment in Iraq because of alcohol problems, he wasn’t immediately eligible for health care available to most veterans. He was jobless and couldn’t afford health insurance.

Brandon Price’s plight was detailed in a Feb. 20 story in the Journal-World.

There were times over the past eight years when Reed tried to reconnect with her son. She lost track of him and her ex-husband, however, and couldn’t find a listed phone number for them. She also knew her son had become old enough to join the military, and when she watched the news about the war in Iraq, she hoped she wouldn’t see a familiar name or face listed as a casualty.

“I had watched the news and I always wondered,” Reed said.

Search pays off

In recent months, Reed became more determined to find her son. She used a co-worker’s computer and started searching the Internet. She checked online phone books and conducted people searches. She even searched the popular MySpace.com., all to no avail.

Late on the night of May 19, Reed was going over more Internet search listings for Brandon Price. She kept skipping over one reference headed “veteran with stress.”

“I just passed right by it because I thought it was about an older person,” Reed said.

When she finally called it up, she found her son. It was the Journal-World story with the headline “Veteran fights for help as he copes with stress.” With the story was a color picture of Brandon helping to coach youths in his dad’s wrestling club, the Lawrence Coyotes.

“I was so excited because I knew it was him,” Reed said.

But Reed still didn’t have a phone number. She hit on the idea of checking to see if the Coyotes had a Web page. It did, and there she found a phone number for Chris Price.

Despite the fact it was midnight in Portland and 2 a.m. in Lawrence, Reed dialed her ex-husband’s phone number and woke him.

“It had just been so long, and I called immediately,” she said. “Brandon was 21 and I felt there was nothing to hold me back.”

A surprised and sleepy Chris Price told Reed to call back later in the day and told her when Brandon would be available.

Chris Price had remarried, and the next morning his wife, Leisa Price, called Reed. Leisa Price said she wanted to find out about Reed before Brandon talked to her.

“I was worried about Brandon,” Leisa Price said. “I wanted to find out what kind of person she was. I liked her instantly. We talked for two hours. She just seemed like a very warm person.”

That evening, Brandon Price called his mother.

“I hadn’t talked to her in so long I really didn’t know what to say,” he recalled. “I didn’t know what she was going to be like, but once I got on the phone with her it was pretty easy to talk to her.”

Mother and son talked for an hour. They talked again the next day for two hours. They have had other phone conversations as well.

“When I asked him to forgive me for the past, he said he had forgiven me a long time ago,” Reed said. “He said he figured I’d done what I had to do.”

Brandon Price will be visiting his mother in Portland in July. Reed is thinking about moving to Lawrence.

“There’s no way I’m going to be happy with one or two visits a year,” she said.

Chris Price said he holds no grudges against his former wife, but initially he, too, had concerns about Brandon and his mother reconnecting. Those concerns are now gone, he said.

“I talked to him after he talked to her and saw his excitement,” Chris Price said. “It just looked like a huge weight he’d been carrying around with him for a long time had been lifted.”

The mother-son reunion is coming at a good time for Brandon Price, Leisa Price said.

“Maybe if it had happened earlier, he wouldn’t have been ready for it,” Leisa Price said. “I think now he is ready.”

Brandon Price now works for a Lawrence landscaping firm. He has undergone counseling at Bert Nash and he meets with a church group. He has undergone an evaluation to see if he can get veteran’s medical benefits but is still awaiting the results.

“He definitely is going through a tough stage in his life,” Reed said of her son. “I don’t know what he went through over there (in Iraq). He’s told me a little, but I think that will all take time.”

Reed said she would have kept searching for her son if she had not found the Journal-World story. She has numerous print-outs of the photo that accompanied that story.

“They are everywhere,” she said. “That’s my first picture of him in eight years. That’s a long time.”