A girl abducted as a newborn in Jacksonville, Fla., 18 years ago has been found alive in South Carolina.
Kamiyah Mobley was kidnapped eight hours into life after a woman posing as a health care worker told the parents she had a fever. The woman never returned after she left the room to conduct tests.
Police have checked around 2,500 tips in relation to the abduction and received one that broke the case last year. A DNA test confirmed the real identity of Mobley, who was raised under the name of Alexis Manigo.
Gloria Williams, 51, was charged with kidnapping Friday morning. Mobley cried against a caged window and said “Momma” when Williams waived extradition to Florida Friday morning, according to WXJT-TV.
Video shows the moment Kamiyah Mobley, now Alexis, says bye to the woman accused of kidnapping her in 1998. – https://t.co/QjCBqd5i6c pic.twitter.com/REqrTXnLCn
— News4JAX (@wjxt4) January 13, 2017
Mobley’s birth family, on the other hand, cried “tears of joy” when they received the news.
“She looks just like her daddy,” Velma Aiken, Mobley’s paternal grandmother, told The Associated Press after talking to Mobley over FaceTime. “She act like she been talking to us all the time. She told us she’d be here soon to see us.”
Mobley’s neighbors never detected any suspicious signs and described her as a normal teenager.
“She wasn’t an abused child or a child who got in trouble,” neighbor Joseph Jenkins told AP. “But she grew up with a lie for 18 years.”
National Center for Missing and Exploited Children helped break the case. The organization has tracked 308 infant abductions since 1983, with 11 children still missing.
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