When a woman in Texas claimed that Alondra Luna Nunez was her long-lost daughter, the girl's real parents in Mexico say they presented more than a dozen documents from baptismal records and a copy of her birth certificate to family photographs.
They were sure it was enough to demonstrate her true origins.
In the end, they say, Alondra was sent screaming to the US based on a scar on the bridge of her nose resulting from a remote-control car mishap as a young girl.
And they blame their traumatic weeklong separation squarely on the judge who made the final call.
"The other girl had a scar, but on the eyebrow, and I have one on my nose. I mean all this was stirred up over that," Alondra, 14, told The Associated Press on Wednesday at an emotional reunion with family after nearly a week away.
"The judge said, 'No, it's her,' and that was that."
DNA testing proved Alondra was not Houston resident Dorotea Garcia's daughter.
The case drew international attention after a video of the distraught girl being forced into a police vehicle last week circulated in media and on social networks.
Judge Cinthia Elodia Mercado told the AP that she held to her obligation to make sure that international child-abduction conventions were followed.
"Our only job is to resolve whether the child needs to be returned or not," she said.
But the resulting drama touched not only Alondra's family in Mexico but also Garcia, who believed she had finally found her daughter, Alondra Diaz Garcia, taken from the US illegally by her father nearly a decade ago.
That girl's whereabouts are unknown, and a felony warrant remains for the father, Reynaldo Diaz.
Alondra said Garcia and the woman's family members apologised to her before she returned.
After Alondra flew into Guanajuato in Central Mexico around noon Wednesday, the family gathered for an afternoon and evening barbecue at her aunt's house.
"Welcome to your real home, Alondra," read a homemade sign.
Family members were spending the day together in private again Thursday, and Alondra planned to return to school on Monday.
Uncle Ruben Nunez said the family was considering whether to pursue legal action, though he did not specify any potential targets of a lawsuit and said no lawyer has been consulted.
"Anger. Rage. Powerlessness that they could tear my daughter from my arms. Sadness," Susana Nunez, Alondra's mother, said, recalling her emotions of the last week.
"I didn't sleep. I didn't eat. I said, 'How is my daughter, what is she doing?'"
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