After 18 years, case of stolen infant resolved
Stolen hours after her birth in a Florida hospital 18 years ago, a young woman who came to suspect she didn’t belong with the people who raised her has been found in South Carolina, and police charged the woman she long believed was her mother with kidnapping.
Thanks to DNA analysis, the young woman now knows her birth name: Kamiyah Mobley.
Jacksonville Sheriff Mike Williams said Friday at a news conference that she’s is in good health but understandably overwhelmed.
Police arrested Gloria Williams, 51, of Walterboro, S.C., at the home where Mobley was raised, and charged her with kidnapping and interference with custody.
In Jacksonville, the young woman’s birth family cried “tears of joy” after a detective told them their baby had been found. Within hours Friday, they were able to reconnect by video chat.
“She looks just like her daddy,” her paternal grandmother, Velma Aiken of Jacksonville, told The Associated Press after they were able to see each other for the first time, on FaceTime. “She act like she been talking to us all the time. She told us she’d be here soon to see us.”
Mobley was only 8 hours old when she was taken from her young mother by a woman posing as a nurse at University Medical Center in 1998. An extensive search ensued, with helicopters circling the hospital and the city on high alert, and thousands of tips came in over the years, but authorities apparently had no clue where she was.
All that time, police said, she was being raised under a different name in Walterboro. Then, some months ago, the young woman “had an inclination” that she may have been kidnapped, the sheriff said.
The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children reached out to the cold case detectives at the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office, and Mobley provided a swab of her cheek for DNA analysis that proved the match, the sheriff said.
The sheriff said Kamiyah is being provided with counseling.
“She’s taking it as well as you can imagine. She has a lot to process,” the sheriff said.
“I always prayed, ‘Don’t let me die before I see my grandbaby,’ ” Aiken said. “My prayer was answered.”