A Summit Hill mother is thankful for many gifts this Mother’s Day.

Reuniting with her 24-year-old daughter, Katrina, who had been considered missing and endangered due to a mental health condition, was among the greatest of those gifts for Karen Horvath.

“It was so nice to finally hold her and hug her, just thinking about that moment wells me up with tears,” she said this week. “It was a gift that I will never take for granted.”

Horvath never gave up on finding Katrina, who left home a year ago in April and ended up the victim of human trafficking in Florida.

She and her husband, Jay, who is suffering from a terminal dementia diagnosis, traveled to Florida last month after police rescued Katrina from the hands of the man who forced her into prostitution to survive.

“He is a monster,” the mom said of Katrina’s abuser, Terrance Gould, 45, who manipulated the young woman for months after they met in Atlantic City, New Jersey, where he had been incarcerated under one of his aliases.

Police in Florida arrested Gould on multiple felony charges related to interstate human trafficking and prostituting the young woman.

“The detectives never gave up on (finding) my daughter,” she said. “They were resilient and they found her and I am just so full of gratitude.”

Katrina is currently living in a temporary shelter for victims of domestic violence in Florida and hopes to move to a specialized shelter that deals with victims of human trafficking, Horvath said.

“There are so many good resources down there for her,” Horvath said. “They are helping her so much.”

The detectives who rescued her continue to check in and visit her and consider Katrina an adoptive daughter, her mother said.

“Even after the arrest, they are caring and they are helping her,” Horvath said. “She is going to therapy and receiving other services.

They keep telling her that she doesn’t know how lucky she is to have a mom that fought very hard for her,” she said. “That made me tear up.”

The search

Horvath did fight hard to find her daughter, enlisting every resource available to her from filing multiple missing person reports to putting information on missing person websites and social media pages.

She also connected with law enforcement in both Pennsylvania and New Jersey, trying to piece together what little she and her family knew of Katrina’s whereabouts.

Horvath also linked up with the FBI in Philadelphia and then detectives in the Florida Department of Law Enforcement after Katrina’s car was repossessed in Miami Beach.

The FDLE houses the Missing Endangered Persons Information Clearinghouse, which accepts cases for missing persons under 26 years old and acts as a central repository.

Law enforcement finally found and separated Katrina from Gould in early April, and she began receiving treatment to work through the trauma she endured.

Horvath was relieved her daughter was brought to safety, but still longed to see her, hug her and reunite her with her father as his condition continues to worsen.

Everyone helped

Horvath, who is the sole support for the family, was willing to go into debt to make that trip to Florida, she said.

“I was just going to put everything on a credit card,” she said. “I never asked for anything.”

But friends, family, co-workers and even strangers reached out to help without a single word, Horvath said.

“I was blown away,” she said. “The church where I work helped, an anonymous person gave me $200, a dear friend of mine gave me money, people from the church where I work also contributed and a very large amount came from a dear friend of mine’s family.”

“One of my brothers and his wife’s family sent me money toward the trip,” Horvath said of the outpouring. “They all pitched in.”

They also had enough to make the two-day trip and buy items for Katrina, such as clothes, shoes and personal items, because she had nothing, Horvath said.

The trip wasn’t without challenges with her husband’s declining condition, and he wandered off several times when her attention turned for just a few moments, Horvath said.

“I was so humbled that people cared so much and knew it was important that she sees her dad, and her dad sees her,” she said. “It was such a blessing.”

Filled with gratitude and undying thanks this Mother’s Day, Horvath hopes one day to pay it forward and help others the way the community came together to help her family.

“I had a lot of angels who gave us the means to see her,” Horvath said. “There are angels who walk among us.”