A teenager stolen from her mother’s arms as a baby has spoken to her birth parents for the first time after detectives found her living hundreds of miles away with the woman accused of kidnapping her.
Kamiyah Mobley, 18, had her world turned upside-down on Friday when Gloria Williams, whom she had believed to be her mother, was arrested in Walterboro, South Carolina.
Until last week the high school graduate had been known as Alexis Manigo, but DNA tests showed she was in fact born to Shanara Mobley and Craig Aiken in Jacksonville, Florida, and raised by a stranger.
Kamiyah broke down in tears and pushed her fingers through a security window as she watched Williams, 51, being taken into custody.
The pair shared a heartfelt goodbye in court when Williams blew a kiss to Kamiyah, who was standing in the public gallery.
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“I love you, Mom!” the distraught teenager shouted back.
Kamiyah’s biological family last saw her when she was just eight hours old, carried away by a woman dressed in a nurse’s blue floral smock and green scrub trousers who claimed the infant was suffering from a fever.
Williams is said to have roamed the University Medical Centre in Jacksonville for 14 hours before vanishing with the baby. She had reportedly suffered a miscarriage just days before she made the three-hour drive from South Carolina, though why she chose the Florida town has not yet been established.
The abduction led to an investigation that received more than 2,500 tips and offered a £200,000 reward for the child’s safe return. Shanara Mobley subsequently received a £1.2m settlement from the hospital.
The girl appears to have been tracked down thanks to a tipoff from an unknown source, but she was absent when police arrived at Williams’s house on Friday morning.
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Later that day she spoke to her biological family in an emotional FaceTime call, a moment they had been hoping for since she was taken.
“She looks just like her daddy,” said her grandmother, Velma Aiken, 66. “She act[s] like she been talking to us all the time. She told us she’d be here soon to see us.”
“I always felt she was alive. I always felt she would find us
Shanara Mobley, who gave birth to Kamiyah when she was 16 and marked each one of her birthdays by storing a slice of cake in the freezer, is “well and looking good”, but the family have not yet set a reunion date because they did not want to rush her, Aiken added.
“I always hoped and prayed this day would happen. I always felt she was alive. I always felt she would find us,” said Craig Aiken, who has never met his daughter because he was in prison when she was born.
He cried “tears of joy” when a detective told him that she had been found. “Now we have the rest of our lives together.”
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It is not yet clear whether Kamiyah will want to return to live with her family, after she posted a heart-wrenching defence of Williams on her Facebook page.
“My mother raised me with everything I needed and most of all everything I wanted,” she wrote. “My mother is no felon.”
Court records show Williams has a criminal record and had previously been found guilty of welfare fraud and writing fake cheques.
Neighbours expressed shock at the revelations, describing Williams as a normal person who volunteered and went to church every Sunday.
Williams’s aunt, Susan Alls, refused to believe Kamiyah was not her niece’s biological daughter.
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“There has to be something going on with the DNA,” she said.