Weirdos - Traffic-stop reunion

LOS ANGELES - Paul Benitez thought the policeman was staring into his eyes to see if he was drunk, but there was another reason: officer Kelly Benitez realized he had found his long-lost father.

"Were you ever married to a woman named Debra?" officer Benitez asked the man in the beat-up Ford Thunderbird he had just pulled over for driving with an expired registration tag.

No, he said, but he had dated a woman with that name about 30 years ago. Then he noticed the officer's name-tag.

"Are you Kelly?" he asked.

The officer nodded.

"Oh my God, I'm your dad," the driver said.

"The Mr. Cop role stopped right there," said the 29-year-old officer.

"It's still hard to believe," the younger Benitez said Friday.

"If there's a lesson in this, it is to never give up," said Paul Benitez, 49, a Los Angeles schoolteacher. "If you're looking for someone, don't stop until you find them."

The two last saw one another when Kelly was 4 months old. Paul and Debra barely knew one another. Paul had just graduated from high school and was headed into the Army. Debra moved away and didn't tell the father where she went. She eventually left the boy with her parents in a suburb of Los Angeles.

Kelly had searched for his father on and off over the years but found nothing and assumed he was dead. The father also looked in vain for his son.