Father always believed he’d be reunited with daughter snatched at birth... and after 18yrs he was
EIGHT hours after her birth in 1998, Kamiyah Mobley was taken from her mother’s arms by a woman posing as a nurse in a sickening kidnap which sparked one of America’s longest-running missing person’s cases.
Kamiyah grew up not knowing that her “mother” was her kidnapper – until three years ago, when she was 18, a series of tip-offs led police to her home and DNA tests proved her true identity.
Now reunited with her real family, she sits with her father Craig Aiken as he sends a message to Madeleine McCann’s parents, telling Kate and Gerry to look to his story and “never give up hope” that their daughter will be found alive.
Craig, 45, says: “We are bound together by the terrible crimes that befell our daughters. Very few parents in the world are united by such an atrocious wrong. But I have worn the shoes the Kate and Gerry now wear. I have walked the footsteps they now tread and I have come out the other side.”
He says he would welcome the chance to speak to the McCanns, whose three-year-old daughter went missing from a holiday apartment in Praia da Luz, Portugal, on May 3, 2007.
He says: “I know only too well their very real pain ain’t going to stop until their child comes home and that’s when the healing is going to begin.
“All I ever used to say is that Kamiyah is coming home. Never once did I give up on my hopes and prayers. I never felt once Kamiyah was dead. I never gave up hope. I would teach Kate and Gerry hope.
“They have to stick together because sometimes you blame it on each other as we did. It can tear you apart. It takes away the concern for the child.”
Kamiyah Mobley was snatched from a hospital in Jacksonville, Florida, in July 1998 by Gloria Williams, who had entered new mum Shanara Mobley’s room posing as a nurse telling her the baby had a fever and had to be checked.
Williams left the ward with the baby and raised Kamiyah as her own, giving her the false name, Alexis Manigo, and a forged birth certificate. Three years ago, after a series of tip-offs, police found Kamiyah in Walterboro, South Carolina, 200 miles from where she was born, living with her abductor.
Williams is serving 18 years for the kidnap, while 21-year-old Kamiyah tries to come to terms with her true origins.
Her relationship with her birth mother is strained, but Kamiyah and her father Craig have a strong bond.
At the time of her birth, music producer Craig was in jail on a minor drugs charge. He explains how a female officer broke the news of her kidnap.
Craig says: “She said, ‘I have good news and bad news’. I said, ‘What’s the good news, because I am already in jail. What could be worse than this?’. She said,