My children's father disappeared from their lives for almost a decade. So I turned to an impossible last resort... within hours I had found him - and his new family

Michelle Dion hit her breaking point one hot and muggy night in late July. The rent for the small Las Vegas apartment that she shared with her three young children had gone up exponentially and so had the cost of utilities.

Dion, 41, picked up as many extra hours as she could at her job in operations leadership at Best Buy, but she couldn't make ends meet – even after cutting costs like paring down the family's groceries to the barest of necessities and keeping the air conditioner off despite the blazing temperatures outside.

For the past nine years, Dion claimed, she has been the sole provider and caretaker for her three children, Isabella, 14; Leonardo, 13; and Juan, ten. She alleges that she has shouldered the full responsibilities of parenting by herself after their father Juan Enrique Pereda left the family and moved out of state in 2017. She also alleges that he has not consistently contributed the $866 monthly child support he has been court ordered to pay and that he has rarely seen their children.

Financial struggle has been a constant for Dion in the years since Pereda left, with the rising costs of living making caring for her family on just one income untenable. She has even sold furniture and other belongings to make the rent all while, she claimed, any support from Pereda had dried up in recent years.

In desperation, Dion said, she turned to social media as a last resort.

'In 2018, my ex & the father of my 3 children got on a plane to Texas,' she claimed in a post on the Threads app. 'He's seen his children a total of 4 days since then & he's been jumping state to state and job to job to avoid our child support order.

'After this many years as a single mom, my resources & patience has run dry. Does anyone know where Juan Enrique Pereda is? He's 41, duck hunt tattoos on each upper arm & his last known location is Lake Elsinore and working at a place called Lunch Bang.'

Within hours, Dion's post had gone viral.

Thousands of women replied to it. Some listed the town where Pereda was living. Others were able to identify where he was currently working. After what she described as nearly a decade in the wilderness, within a matter of hours she had her ex's location, his living arrangements and the fact that he had a new partner and family. His current girlfriend has three children.

'I was overwhelmed,' Dion told the Daily Mail of her decision to write about her predicament on Threads. 'It was desperation. I posted it feeling my lowest - I didn't think anyone was going to respond, but it felt good to just be truthful. And it was so surprising that people took the time to help without even knowing me.'

Indeed, Dion's situation resonated with thousands of women online, who shared their own experiences of deadbeat dads and bad exes in the replies. To date the post has been liked more than 30,000 times, reposted more than 2,000 times and generated over 4,000 replies.

Dion had felt devastatingly alone when she wrote the post. Suddenly she had the support and engagement of tens of thousands of women. Those women included one very unlikely champion: Noelle Thompson, the mother of two of Pereda's other children, who wrote in support of Dion under the post and shared what she claimed was her own harrowing experience with Pereda.

'As the mother of his 2 oldest children, I can tell you this isn't an isolated situation,' Thompson wrote under Dion's post. She went onto allege: 'He left us in 2010, and my kids have seen him maybe 3 times. He now has SIX children that he has chosen not to be a father to, including ours.

'For the past 16 years, I've raised our boys without him while he avoided his responsibilities. My heart breaks for every one of these kids, and I hope this post finally brings some accountability.'

According to Dion, Pereda had led her to believe that Thompson was some sort of nightmare ex. But when the women met briefly during what Dion said was one of Pereda's rare visits to see the sons he shares with Thompson, she was struck by the other woman's kindness. Thompson even brought a gift for Dion's daughter Isabella, who had just been born.

Later, as Dion's relationship with Pereda began to unravel, she and Thompson had begun texting sporadically. Still, she never dreamed that Thompson would come out in such public support.

For Dion, having the support of Thompson and all the other women online has been invaluable, helping to 'lift [her] spirits for days,' although she found it bittersweet that so many of them have gone through the same frustrations with the fathers of their children that she had.

Dion said: 'It feels better knowing that I'm not alone, but it also makes me feel sad that a lot of other women have gone through this so much that they're like 'Let's help this girl.'

'I think women are known for sticking together for the most part. We've all experienced being talked down to and taken advantage of and left. What's the higher statistic – being a single mom or a single dad? It's being a single mom, through the roof!'

For Dion, she said, the hunt for Pereda was never about herself. It was about her children: 'I don't want anything to do with him, but I want to know where he is for the sake of my kids, so it felt great to have strangers that were trying to help me.'

Dion first met Pereda in 2011 at work, when they were both 25, after he got hired at the Best Buy. She was struck by his charm and humor and found herself drawn to him despite just getting out of a long-term relationship.

Looking back, Dion admitted, the relationship was a whirlwind. Within a month of meeting, Pereda had moved into her apartment. She became pregnant with their first child Isabella less than a year later. 

'I started a serious relationship with him right away, which was very not like me,' Dion said. 'But he was unlike anyone else I had met before. I was having a baby with someone I didn't really know that well, but he made me feel like I knew him right away.'

She was smitten and she did what so many others have done before her – she ignored the warnings of friends and family who 'didn't really trust him,' and pushed on, determined to make this relationship work.

'In the beginning, he was very caring, very attentive, very funny,' Dion said. 'I loved that he was a musician, a drummer. I was so in love with him. He spoke two languages. He knew how to cook. His family was so inviting and always throwing parties.'

Shortly before their daughter was born, Dion claimed, Pereda quit his job at Best Buy. After that, she claimed, it fell to her to provide for their family. According to Dion, Pereda was reluctant to work because of the court ordered child support he was meant to provide for his sons by Thompson. If he worked, Dion alleged, his wages would be garnished.

By the time that Dion was pregnant with their second child, she claimed, Pereda had changed into a man she barely knew – seemingly more interested in practicing with his band than spending time with her and the children.

Dion said: 'After our second baby, it was like night and day. I wasn't allowed to hang out with my friends. He was very reactive and it was always like walking on eggshells around him.

'It was too much for me. I wanted to save for a bigger house, maybe move to have a backyard for the kids. Our goals were like completely different – he was like, 'Well, our band is going to tour.'

'I thought my kids were going to have this great life, but it wasn't like that. We had two kids and there was a lot of crying and changing and he would always want to leave. I needed help.'

Dion said that she was the one to call quits on the relationship when she realized that their values didn't align when it came to how to raise their children. By this time, they had three.

For Dion, while Pereda's exit from their lives has been a source of financial stress, she believes that the true cost is his absence from their children's lives.

Dion said: 'They're good kids. They deserve culture and family in their life.

'I don't want them to feel like we're struggling anymore or for them to see me struggle. I've done my best, and we do fun things together. But I think there's so much more opportunities that we've had to turn down. My son wants to sign up for hockey. My daughter is an artist. I'd love to put her in art school, but we can't.'

Dion said that the post going viral not only helped her locate Pereda, but it also elicited responses from him and his current girlfriend who took to Threads in defense of her partner. 'There's two stories and listening to one side based on the rage of a woman craving attention is not fair,' she wrote in response to a commenter who called Pereda's behavior a 'red flag.'

Contacted by the Daily Mail, Pereda acknowledged that his financial support as a parent has been 'nowhere near' what the child support order mandates.

He claimed that he sends about $200 every few months, but 'not steadily,' because he's been in what he described as, 'survival mode' and 'nothing's really panned out.'

Pereda continued: 'I don't have a problem "fessing up" to all the things I've done wrong, but I don't like how hard everyone's run with it.

'People don't know the whole story...the absentee father stuff, it's not one-sided. I'm not particularly proud of that happening, but at the end of the day, it is what it is.'

He has messaged Dion to ask her to take the post down. She has no intention of doing so.

Instead, she hopes that the public scrutiny could lead to some accountability when it comes to his responsibilities as a parent.

'I hope something sparks in Juan and he doesn't see it as his money is being sucked out of his paycheck, but that he's actually contributing towards their future and their happiness and needs.'

Perhaps surprisingly, she harbors hope that, after all these years, finding Pereda in such a public fashion will not be about shaming him but about opening the door for something more positive for them all: 'I'm hoping for some real adult accountability because I think he could very well turn it around if he truly wanted to.'