Family Whose Baby Was Stolen and Now They Have Nothing

Shanara Mobley at her Northside Jacksonville home 20 years after her first-born daughter, Kamiyah, was kidnapped from the hospital as a newborn. [Bob Self/Florida Times-Union]

Each year she'd buy a cake for the little girl she didn't know. Sometimes, in that location'd be family unit trip or a big party in honour of the child that wouldn't exist there. Sometimes, it wasn't so splashy. Merely e'er, in that location was a cake with candles and she'd make a wish or two.

Information technology was a wish that her child who was stolen from the hospital on July 10, 1998, would return domicile, a wish that her nightmare would cease.

Each July 10, Shanara Mobley cut a piece of cake for herself so cutting a piece for her missing kid, Kamiyah. She'd wrap Kamiyah'due south piece and place information technology in the freezer just in case. Another birthday. Another year without her daughter. Another cake. Another wish.

This yr there won't be any block. And who knows about side by side year or the year later on that, because only one of Mobley's wishes came true.

TIMELINE | The abduction of Kamiyah Mobley

In January 2017, after the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children received 2 tips, investigators with the Jacksonville Sheriff's Part plant Kamiyah Mobley living in rural South Carolina. Kamiyah was Alexis Kelli Manigo.

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Mobley was ecstatic to hear the words she waited 18½ years to hear: We found your daughter. The abducted child was happy, she learned. She was healthy. She was living a proficient life.

That's where Shanara Mobley's storybook ending concluded.

Gloria Williams — the well-educated, God-fearing woman who provided care to veterans, her elderly parents and the abducted girl — admitted in a Duval Canton court to abducting Kamiyah after she had a miscarriage in 1998. The 52-year-erstwhile was sentenced last month to xviii years in prison for kidnapping and interference of custody.

Since January 2017, the emotions of the soon-to-be-20-year-old adult female with two names — Kamiyah Mobley and Alexis Manigo — accept been playing out similar some nonstop tug of war.

Manigo — the proper noun she has chosen to go by, at least for now — loves the woman who stole her from the University Medical Centre maternity ward. She still calls her Mommy. They talk on the phone. They write messages. She loves that adult female's family, including the two brothers she was raised with, as well as her abductor's parents. She is edifice a relationship with her biological father and his wife.

But Manigo's relationship with Mobley is tenuous at best. They currently do not speak. Later on her abductor's arrest, the teen said she hoped Williams' sentence would non exist a long one. Information technology was.

When Mobley learned Alexis was alive, on Jan. xiii, 2017, she likened the joy to giving birth all over again: "It was one of the happiest days of my life."

Mobley then learned that her daughter found out a twelvemonth and a half before Williams' arrest that she was child who had been abducted from Jacksonville and that she did non go to authorities. Instead, the girl had told Williams to run if she had to. Mobley also learned that when constabulary establish her girl and Williams in Walterboro, S.C., last year, her daughter demanded police return with a search warrant to obtain Deoxyribonucleic acid for testing.

Mobley said she was willing to look past some things, like her daughter knowing she was abducted but not doing anything. She expected her daughter would render. She expected she would want to exist office of the family. And she expected she would want to gather at times of celebration.

"We were going to exist this big, happy family unit," she said.

On Mother's Day 2017, iv months later on Mobley learned her daughter was live, her daughter sent two Mother's Days cards to a Duval County jail where Williams was being held awaiting the outcome of her case. She didn't send one to Mobley.

Same thing this yr. No carte. No call. Not even a text message.

Mobley has at present blocked her girl from contacting her by jail cell phone. "I don't bargain with disrespect," she said through tears. "I wish they never would have constitute her."

So much for dreams come truthful.

BROKEN AT Nascence

Having a infant was supposed to make Mobley'due south life correct, perhaps for the kickoff time. She was molested at historic period 9, and information technology connected for ii years. Past xiii, she was pretty much on her own.

Mobley said she ran the streets pretty hard in her younger years — running away, getting into problem. Her life at the time was half circumstance and half the event of choices she made equally a teenager, she said. She was sheltered from very little. When she went to school, she went to Eugene Butler Heart. But much of the fourth dimension she chose not to go.

Her home life was spent bouncing betwixt relatives and friends or lying about her age and then she could become live-in babysitting jobs. Jobs meant shelter and coin. Money meant freedom to run the streets, to skip school, to practice what she wanted.

Mobley was 15 when she learned she was pregnant, the result of carrying on with a man vii years older, a homo whose mother lived across the street from an uncle's business firm where she was staying.

She had been pregnant earlier, when she was fourteen, but miscarried. This time would be different, she vowed. This time, God was sending her a sign to get her life in social club, to end running away, to have a purpose.

She exercised. She ate well. She tried to stay away from smokers.

While in a juvenile detention programme she met a teen mom with a baby named Kamiyah. The baby was beautiful, she said, and she loved the how the proper name rolled off her tongue. It fabricated her happy.

Mobley filled her room at her uncle's house with new and used baby clothes and a stark white bassinet — gifts from a church as a well as a counselor at the juvenile program.

Doctors wanted to induce labor on June 30, 1998, and told the teenager to go to the hospital. Mobley refused. She was scared. Nine days afterwards her water broke.

Her uncle drove her to the hospital late that Thursday nighttime. When he and his lady friend were asked by a doctor to step out into the hallway while Mobley was given an epidural, they left the hospital. The babe'south begetter, Craig Aiken, was in jail on a drug charge. Mobley'south mother lived in Primal Florida.

The child was left on her ain to have a child, and 8-pound Kamiyah was built-in the next morning.

Mobley was eager to go back to her uncle'south and become a mother.

"Oh man, I was ready to get. I was ready to go then. I'm like, 'This is really my babe; so big, so beautiful.' And the smiles we gave to each other, I'g like, 'This is my baby.' I was anxious. I was ready to go and then. I wanted her to sleep in her bassinet," she said.

A woman wearing scrubs who had been lingering around the hospital since the night before came into Room 328 and told the teen mom she was a nurse and had been assigned to care for her and her baby. They spent the next five hours together. At 3 p.m., the woman said she had to accept the baby to become checked for a fever. She never returned.

That woman was Gloria Williams.

Mobley went back to her uncle's business firm, merely the bassinet, bottles and clothing she had in her room for her girl haunted her. So she left and went back to her old means. She had nightmares. She self-medicated. She tried to kill herself.

"I only didn't want to be here," she said. "Every day people got to stay around me all day, every day to watch me. Nobody is leaving me unattended," she said.

Over the next two½ years Jacksonville Sheriff'southward Office investigators followed more than than two,000 leads from equally far abroad as Nova Scotia, simply none led to Baby Kamiyah. No matter how far the net was cast for suspects, police kept a close eye on the Mobley and Aiken families.

Information technology wasn't simply constabulary who considered Mobley a suspect.

"Everybody was saying I sold the baby, I gave the baby away," she said. "Come on now, if I thought it was going to be this difficult, I could take got an abortion. I could yet be running the streets. I could accept been doing drugs, drinking, all that. I chose to do correct: to take a beautiful infant."

Five years passed before she had some other infant and got to experience motherhood for more than eight hours. LaShawnye is 15 now.

Mobley continued to accept children: Christopher, Chrisanna, Savannah and Journye, who, at 3, is the youngest. She said she'd like to have another kid. If she does and it's a daughter, she plans to proper noun her Starr Blessed Organized religion Mobley. Mobley's nickname is Starr.

"God always gives me what my heart desires," Mobley said. Maternity, she said, has always been her desire. To her, information technology's a purpose. The children in her abode shower her with dearest and attention on Mother'southward 24-hour interval. This past May she received slippers and balm from her children living in her home.

Sitting at her large kitchen tabular array, Mobley began to weep. She tilted her head toward the stairway: "Those kids up at that place love me. They love me and nobody can take that away from me."

BROKEN TRUST

Mobley has issues with trust. Men come and get in her life. She said information technology'due south rare for her to have a relationship with a man that lasts longer than two years. She fears the worst when her children want to footstep outside to play. Most play is inside, she said.

When Williams abducted Kamiyah, she acted alone. Still, Mobley said, she feels like the community yet faults her, believing she played a part in social club to get money from the hospital.

She was awarded a $1.2 1000000 settlement after the hospital was sued for lax oversight and security. She bought a house with some of the coin but lost information technology to foreclosure. She said she gave some of the coin away. She believes people, fifty-fifty the very people she helped financially, have snickered at her. She'south also read comments on social media that side with her daughter's kidnapper.

She said her daughter, LaShawnye, who is heading into the 10th grade, argues with people on Facebook in defense of her mother.

Her children, she said, shouldn't have to struggle similar she did, and does. At present, to Mobley, it feels every bit if Williams and her ain daughter are conspiring against her and making a mockery of her life.

"She has been failed past so many," said Carl Harms, a victims' advocate with the Office of the State Attorney for the Fourth Judicial Circuit. Harms was assigned the case to assistance Mobley empathise the court procedure and to take a vocalism.

In February, Williams changed her not guilty plea to guilty, essentially forgoing a full trial.

By doing and so, a potential life judgement was off the tabular array and the prosecutor and Williams' defence attorney agreed to a judgement of no more than than 22 years. In May, in that location was a sentencing hearing. Mobley sat hunched over much of the time and cried. Her daughter sat several rows back, either with an chaser from Southward Carolina or past herself.

When called to the witness stand up, Mobley lashed out at Williams. She wanted her daughter to understand something: "I'm still hurting. I'm your mother, Kamiyah. I'm your mother."

Mobley told the judge she idea Williams should go the expiry punishment.

"Manifestly that is non advisable for this case," said Assistant State Attorney Alan Mizrahi. "So do yous recommend the maximum sentence the court can requite?"

Aye, Mobley said, calculation she wished at that place was a manner to go a court order so that her daughter and Williams could not accept whatsoever contact.

That way she could finally starting time a relationship with her daughter. "I demand her away, far away, where she cannot contact my infant, where my baby cannot go to her," she said.

The no-contact order wasn't pursued again in court.

BROKEN DREAMS

Sitting at her kitchen table late last calendar month, Mobley said she was feeling an unbearable weight of stress and low. She worried near the touch of information technology all on her other children.

"This is what Gloria [Williams] and Kamiyah brought upon my children. And I truly experience it in my heart; I merely wish she would not accept come up back. I really do. Because [Kamiyah] came dorsum, this has fabricated a mockery of my life.

"I'k nonetheless lost. I don't accept a relationship with my child," she said. "What did I gain? Null."

She said she hopes Williams dies in jail. Then maybe, just maybe, she and her girl will have a relationship.

"Equally long as she can call her and go see her, that's her momma," Mobley said. "I'chiliad about to beginning calling her Alexis so I won't be hurt. I'm serious. I'm serious. I accept to offset doing things where I don't hurt no more."

Looking into a video camera, Mobley had this to say to her daughter:

"If you lot want to be Alexis, be Alexis. If you want to be her kid, be her child. This is a battle that I can't go on fighting. This is a battle that nobody is going to win."

Eileen Kelley: (904) 359-4104

On the 20th anniversary of the abduction of Kamiyah Mobley from a Jacksonville hospital, the Times-Union and jacksonville.com nowadays a new podcast, "Have You Seen Kamiyah?"

The true-offense serial podcast, a first for the Times-Marriage, retells the kidnapping of Kamiyah and search for the missing newborn, offer new insights into the case from key figures, including interviews with Kamiyah'southward female parent, Shanara Mobley, then-Sheriff Nat Glover and others, as well equally details from court documents and trial testimony.