Stolen girl: ‘My mother’s no felon’
A YOUNG woman who was abducted from hospital just eight hours after being born told her kidnapper she loved her yesterday as she prepared to be reunited with her biological family – after 18 years.
Kamiyah Mobley was snatched from a hospital in Jacksonville, Florida, in 1998 in a notorious kidnapping, given a new name and brought up just 200 miles away by a woman she believed to be her birth mother.
Called Alexis Manigo, she was raised by Gloria Williams with her other children in Walterboro, South Carolina, until Friday when police finally revealed her true identity following a tip-off and DNA testing.
Williams, 51, who was arrested and faces extradition from South Caro- lina to Florida, could be jailed for life if convicted of the kidnapping. But in incredible scenes yesterday, Kamiyah told Williams, ‘I love you, Mom,’ as the two spoke through a security grill at Colleton jail.
On Friday, Kamiyah had a tearful videophone conversation with her biological mother, Shanara Mobley, father Craig Aiken and grandmother Velma Aiken. Last night, her real mother was reported to be en route to South Carolina to be reunited with her daughter.
Mrs Aiken said: ‘Nobody works miracles but God. I know now that he heard my prayers.’ She added that the teenager ‘doesn’t act like we’re brand new people. She acts like she’s been talking to us for a long time. She’s alive, well and looking good.’
But there was no sign Kamiyah would turn her back on her kidnapper. Posting on Facebook under her assumed identity, she wrote: ‘My mother raised me with everything I needed and most of all everything I wanted. My mother is no felon.’
It is believed Williams suffered a miscarriage shortly before July 10, 1998, when a woman wearing a blue floral smock and green scrub trousers took eight-hour-old Kamiyah in a white blanket and disappeared.
Authorities said the suspect had roamed the halls of the University Medical Center in Jacksonville for 14 hours, but grainy CCTV footage could not iden- tify her.
She spent five hours with Kamiyah and her mother, then aged just 16, before saying the baby had a fever and t takingki th the if infantt away. Nurses thought she was a member of their family.
A nationwide police hunt followed. Detectives were hampered by the lack of a photograph of the baby and put together a composite.
Relations with the child’s parents were strained as Kamiyah’s father, Craig, then 23, was already in jail on a drugs charge when she was born and was later jailed again for lewd, la lascivious and indecent as assault on a child, as Sh Shanara was only 15 when the baby was conceived. Mr Mrs Aiken claimed police sus suspected Shanara of playing a part in the kidnap and put pressure on him to tell them what he knew. Af After an anonymous tipoff to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, a DNA sample from the teenager was taken and it was matched with the DNA taken the day Kamiyah was born. The test confirmed the girl was, in fact, Kamiyah. Last night, her father Craig said: ‘I always hoped and prayed this day would happen. I always felt she was alive and she would find us.’