Juan Respetro was a soldier and the biological father of Angela Candela, an adopted child who was the subject of a kidnapping case. Although Juan agreed to the original adoption plan when his then-girlfriend Lucia Gomez told him that she was pregnant while he was off in Iraq, he sustained an injury during combat duty that would make it impossible for him to father children in the future. When accused of kidnapped Angela and attempting to extort a ransom from her adoptive parents, he reacts with shock and insists that his only motive was to see if Angela was doing fine.