Teen Abducted From Jacksonville Hospital Reunites With Parents
For more than a decade Kamiyah Mobley has called the wrong woman “mom” after being abducted from a Jacksonville hospital. On Saturday Mobley was reunited with her birth parents for the first time since 1998.
Mobley, now 18 years old, met with her parents at the police department in Walterboro, multiple media outlets reported. Walterboro, the South Carolina city where she was raised and found, is 50 miles west of Charleston.
Craig Aiken, the birth father of Mobley, told the Associated Press that after a 45-minute meeting he was still in shock about being reunited with his long-lost daughter.
“The first meeting was beautiful. It was wonderful,” Aiken said to the AP. “It’s hard to put into words right now. We are just trying to process it – 18 years. It’s going to be hard to make that up. I just can’t describe it.”
Mobley had been taken from her hospital room when she was only eight hours old in 1998, by a woman posing as a nurse. Tips made to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children led officers to Gloria Williams, 51. Mobley was identified after a recent DNA swab matched a DNA swab that was taken from Mobley when she was a newborn at University Medical Center, now known as UF Health-Jacksonville.
This week police charged Gloria Williams, 51, of Walterboro with kidnapping. She is being extradited to Florida to face charges.
Aiken told the AP that it’s not clear what is next for his family. Kamiyah will decide whether or not she will visit Florida since she is now an adult. He told reporters that he would tell other parents with missing children to keep hope alive.
“Just keep praying, keep fighting, if it happened to me, it can happen to anybody,” he said to the AP.