Kamiyah Mobley
Kamiyah Mobley living now as Alexis Manigo
It was the moment that summed up the whirlwind of confused emotions that must have filled the breast of 18-year-old Kamiyah Mobley.
Less than 24 hours after discovering that she had been abducted at birth from a Florida hospital, Kamiyah found herself in a South Carolina courtroom staring across at the women who – until very recently – she had no reason to doubt was her biological mother.
That woman, 51-year-old Gloria Williams, was now sitting in the dock behind a protective screen facing charges of kidnapping Kamiyah when she was just eight hours old – turned overnight from a mother to a kidnapper.
Kamiyah Mobley and Gloria Williams
Pictures posted on social media showed the two riding happily in together in a car and Kamiyah with her high school friends.
Kamiyah showed no trace of anger towards the woman who had brought her up, at one point walking over to Williams and touching her hands through the screen. “I love you”, she was heard to say to the woman she still called “Momma”.
Williams, whose mother, father and pastor were also present, was seen blowing a kiss at her family. She is reported to have suffered a miscarriage a week before the abduction.
Kamiyah defended the woman who raised her in Walterboro, South Carolina, a small, racially mixed town of 5,000 people 50 miles west of Charleston where the family moved seven years ago.
My mother raised me with everything I needed and most of all everything I wanted,” Kamiyah wrote on Facebook. “My mother is no felon.”
The case broke after a tip-off to by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children led police to the home of Williams where they identified Kamiyah as the missing child of Shanara Mobley, abducted from a hospital room in Jacksonville, Florida on July 10 1998.
DNA swabs and analysis of fraudulent documents used to register Kamiyah’s ‘birth’ by Williams quickly confirmed that the young woman who knew herself as Alexis Manigo was in fact Kamiyah Mobley.
Grainy footage, recorded on CCTV, showed pictures of a woman dressed as a nurse, wearing scrubs and surgical gloves, leaving the University Medical Centre, Florida with the baby in her arms wrapped in a pink and blue blanket.
But if Kamiyah’s apparent loyalty to her ‘mother’ had caused pain among her biological family 200 miles away in Florida, they appeared to be overwhelmed by the joyfulness of the news that the child they had lost, was now found.
Kamiyah’s biological mother pictured in 1998 when her daughter was abducted
Her mother Shanara Mobley told The Florida Times-Union newspaper in 2008, that on the 10th anniversary of the kidnapping, that on her daughter’s birthday each years she had wrapped a piece of birthday cake in foil and put it in the freezer.
“It’s stressful to wake up every day, knowing that your child is out there and you have no way to reach her or talk to her,” she said.
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