A 51-year-old woman was arrested for kidnapping a baby back in 1998 after the child, now 18, was found alive in South Carolina. Investigating new tips, Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office cold case detectives found an 18-year-old woman with the same birthday as Kamiyah Mobley, the abducted baby, and learned her documents were fraudulent. After taking a DNA sample, the detectives discovered she was the missing baby.
Mobley always believed the woman raising her was her mother, and was brought up under the name Alexis Manigo. “They were like best friends,” family friend Melissa Hiers told CNN of Mobley and her alleged kidnapper. Gloria Williams was arrested and charged with kidnapping and interference with custody. She is being held without bond, waived extradition Friday, and will be taken to Jacksonville to face her charges there.
The 18-year-old met her biological family for the first time Saturday. “I always hoped and prayed for this day to happen. I never gave up,” her birth father, Craig Aiken, told WJXT-TV. “You never lose hope, no matter how much time passes. You never give up. I just always felt she was alive. I always felt she was going to find us.”
Jacksonville Sheriff Mike William told WJXT-TV Mobley is a little overwhelmed, and understandably so. “She appears to be a normal 18-year-old woman,” the sheriff said. “She’s taking it as well as you can imagine. She has a lot to process.”
Before meeting her biological family in person, Mobley was able to FaceTime with them within hours of detectives informing her parents they had located their daughter after almost two decades. “She looks just like her daddy,” her paternal grandmother, Velma Aiken, told WJXT-TV. “She acts like she been talking to us all the time. She told us she’d be here soon to see us.”
Mobley was abducted from the hospital by a woman dressed as a nurse right after she was born on July 10, 1998. The police said her alleged kidnapper used fake documents to establish a new identity for Mobley, setting her up as her daughter, Alexis Manigo.
Mobley saw the woman she knows as her mother in the South Carolina detention center where she’s being held, saying, “I love you, Momma,” through sobs, CNN reports.
During a news conference Friday, officials said Mobley started to suspect Gloria wasn’t her biological mother a few months ago, but it’s unclear who provided the new tips that led investigators to the mother and daughter in Walterboro, South Carolina, 200 miles north of Jacksonville.
Original by The Frisky
