After decades, Shanara Mobley was reunited with her kidnapped daughter Kamiyah, but this is no happy ending.
“I wish they never would have found her,” she told The Florida Times-Union on Saturday..
South Carolina woman Gloria Williams admitted in court last May that she suffered a miscarriage in 1998, pretended to be a nurse and took Mobley’s newborn from a Florida hospital. She raised the girl for 18 years as Alexis Manigo.
Mobley said she was ecstatic upon learning in January 2017 that authorities found her daughter.
“It was one of the happiest days of my life,” she told the Times-Union. Things have changed. The daughter still goes by the name Alexis Manigo. In 2017, she sent Mother’s Day cards to the Duval County jail where Williams was being held. But Mobley got nothing. She didn’t get a card, text, or call this year either, she said.
“I don’t deal with disrespect,” she said. “I wish they never would have found her.”
Mobley blocked her daughter from reaching out to her on the cell phone. Manigo’s relationship with her biological father and his wife is reportedly warmer.
Signs of a possible rift between the daughter and birth mother were apparent early. Manigo spoke to Good Morning America in January 2017. She said Williams raised her well, and doesn’t hold the kidnapping against her.
“From that one mistake, I was given the best life,” she said. “I was. I had everything I ever needed, wanted. I had love especially.”
Manigo said of Williams: “She will always be mom.”
At a sentencing hearing last May, she called for Williams to get the death penalty. She doesn’t want her daughter to have a relationship with the kidnapper, and told the Times-Union that she hopes the 52-year-old Williams, who is serving an 18 year sentence, would die in prison so she could possibly have a real relationship with Manigo. She said the whole situation has “made a mockery of my life.”
“If you want to be Alexis, be Alexis,” she addressed Manigo. “If you want to be her child, be her child. This is a battle that I can’t keep fighting. This is a battle that nobody is going to win.”
[Screengrab via The Florida Times-Union on YouTube]
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