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Baby Kamiyah: Florida Baby Kidnapped 18 Years Ago Found Alive And Well In South Carolina

By Aaron Homer
Published on: 09:57 PST, Jan 13, 2017

‘Baby Kamiyah’ Mobley, a Florida girl who was kidnapped as an infant, has been found alive and well and living in South Carolina under an assumed name, First Coast News is reporting.

The 18-year-old woman has been told that the person she thought was her mother, Gloria Williams, 51, is not her mother and that she had been kidnapped. She is adjusting to this new revelation and has asked for privacy, according to Jacksonville Sheriff Mike Williams.

“She was abducted as a newborn and needs time to process this… we want to respect her privacy and we ask that you do too.”

Back in 1998, the story of “Baby Kamiyah,” as the media called her, gripped the Jacksonville, Florida area and garnered national attention. On July 10, just eight hours after Kamiyah Mobley was born, a woman entered her mother’s room at Jacksonville’s University Medical Center (now UF Health-Jacksonville) posing as a nurse. The woman, allegedly Williams, told Kamiyah’s mother that the baby had a fever and needed to be checked out. She exited the room with the baby and then disappeared for the next 18 years.

An intense manhunt was launched, and authorities began following hundreds of leads. Initially, police believed Kamiyah’s mother might have known the suspect as the two had interacted earlier in the day, but that lead proved false. So did 2,500 leads. Grainy security footage from the hospital’s security cameras proved to be too blurry to be useful in identifying a suspect, and the security camera in the hospital’s nursery was broken. Police used a sketch of the suspect, and lacking any photos of the baby herself, couldn’t tell the public much except that she was African American and would have an umbilical hernia, like an “outie” belly button, and bruised buttocks.

A $250,000 reward also failed to generate any answers, and the case even appears on the popular-at-the-time TV show, America’s Most Wanted. Kamiyah’s mother, meanwhile, sued the hospital and won a $1.5 million settlement.

Meanwhile, Williams had escaped to Walterboro, South Carolina, and raised her as her own under a name that authorities are not releasing to the public to protect her privacy.

By 2015, after Baby Kamiyah’s case had gone cold, police got a couple of leads that turned promising. As of this writing, it is not clear what information, specifically, was given to police that led them to Waterboro and Williams. However, when they started asking around town, they were quickly able to focus on Williams.

Authorities say that Williams had used fake documents to establish her “daughter’s” identity. Kamiyah herself also suspected that something was amiss with her “mother’s” story, although police aren’t saying why. Once police zeroed in on the woman who they thought was Kamiyah, who had been living as if she had the same birthdate as Kamiyah, the woman willingly gave a DNA sample, When it matched Baby Kamiyah’s, police knew they’d finally found her after all these years.

Police arrested Williams on felony charges of kidnapping – charges which can put her behind bars for life – as well as charges of interference with custody of a child. She has been booked into jail in South Carolina and will likely be extradited to Florida soon.

Meanwhile, authorities have notified Kamiyah’s biological family back in Jacksonville.

“They were elated… they were overwhelmed with emotion.”

Although Baby Kamiyah has been positively identified, and her alleged kidnapper is in jail, police are still treating the matter as an ongoing investigation, and more arrests and charges are still possible.

[Featured Image by andriano.cz/Shutterstock]

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