Baby Kidnapped 18 Years Ago Found Alive, Calls Alleged Kidnapper ‘Mom’

Heart in baby's crib

(kieferpix/iStockPhoto)

An 18-year-old woman from North Carolina has just had her entire world turned upside-down this week, because she discovered that the woman who had raised her, and who she had been calling “mom” for her whole life was not her biological mother, she was the woman who had allegedly kidnapped her from a hospital when she was only eight hours old.

 

According to The Telegraph, in 1998 a woman in Florida named Shanara Mobley gave birth to a healthy baby girl she named Kamiyah. That day, she says a woman dressed as a nurse came into the room and talked to her and helped her with her hours-old baby girl. She was there for hours, chatting with and helping the new mother. Then she said the baby had a fever and would have to be checked by a doctor, so she said she’d be right back and carried the baby off, ostensibly to take her temperature. Instead she walked out of the hospital with the baby, and neither of them was seen again for 18 years.

Surveillance videos caught the kidnapping, but the woman was able to leave with the eight-hours-old baby.

Kamiyah Mobley’s paternal grandmother, Velma Aiken, has been beating herself up for nearly 20 years because she passed the woman in the hallway when she was leaving with the baby. Aiken says she thought for a moment that it was a bit odd that the nurse had a purse with her, but when she went to call staff to see what was going on, it was too late. For the past 18 years she’s been thinking, what if she’d only gone after that woman right there.

”I just feel like if I would have reacted on my feelings ”¦ I could have done something,” she said in an update on the case eight years ago, when they were still hoping to find the baby, who would have been 10 at the time. ”I could have taken that lady out with my bare hands.”

Shanara Mobley cried on the news and begged the kidnapper to bring her baby back, but to no avail.

Now, however, Kamiyah Mobley has been found. She was alive and well in North Carolina, where she was called Alexis and appears to have had a pretty happy childhood. Reports say she graduated from high school last spring, and she has a steady boyfriend. Neighbors say she frequently got manicures with her mother, a woman named Gloria Williams.

When DNA evidence proved that Alexis was Kamiyah Mobley, Gloria Williams was arrested and charged with kidnapping and interference with custody. Police think she was probably the woman dressed as a nurse who stole the baby from Shanara Mobley’s hospital room back in 1998.

Shanara Mobley and her family are, of course, ecstatic to know the baby is alive, but for the baby, this is a lot more complicated. As far as she’s concerned, Gloria Williams is her mother. Following Williams’ arrest, the girl was sobbing at the police station and crying, “Mama!” through the bars of Williams’ holding cell. Later, she took to Facebook to defend her.

“My mother raised me with everything I needed and most of all everything I wanted,” she wrote. “My mother is no felon.”

This is so gutting. Police say she’s taking it as well as a person can be. Obviously it’s going to be extremely difficult for her. Police say she’s getting counseling, and it will be up to her to decide how she wants to proceed with her biological family. They of course want to see her, but she’s an adult now, and it will be up to her.

 

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