Daughter, Presumed Dead, Reunited With Her Mother After Kidnapping

A woman and her daughter, the latter of who was presumed dead nearly 30 years ago but was actually abducted by a relative and living a short distance from her real family, recently told their extraordinary story to The Guardian.

In December 1997, a fire tore through the Philadelphia home of Luz Cuevas and her partner, Pedro Vera. Particularly hard hit by the blaze was the second floor bedroom occupied by their 10-day-old daughter, Delimar. Authorities determined Delimar perished in the fire, but Cuevas never believed that was the case.

Six years later, at a local child’s birthday party, Cuevas saw a young girl named Aaliyah who closely resembled Delimar and appeared to be the same age. She was so sure it was her daughter that she surreptitiously snipped a lock of the young girl’s hair and took it to the police, requesting they run a DNA test.

“I have dimples and all of my siblings have dimples," Delimar recently said of her mothers’ intuition on the U.K. talk show This Morning. "That was the first giveaway from her. She always says, ‘Blood calls,’ so she could sense that I was hers.”

Around the time Cuevas sent the hair to the police, Delimar has a memory of the woman who she believed was her true mother, Carolyn Correa, spraying “some kind of substance in my mouth.” Delimar later learned that the liquid was Correa’s saliva, presumably so that any DNA test would confirm “Aaliyah” was her child.

But science prevailed, and the DNA test confirmed that Delimar was Cuevas’ daughter. Correa was taken into custody and charged with kidnapping. In 2005, she was found guilty and sentenced to 30 years in prison. For six years, Delimar lived as Aayliah with Cuevas in Willingboro, N.J., just 15 miles away from her true family in Philadelphia.

“At first it was really exciting,” Delimar said about the media attention her return home attracted. “All the cameras and the gifts, but then it became too much having to go in our home through the backyard.” She struggled to assimilate, bouncing from her mother’s home to her father’s and eventually, at age 15, a group house. “I tried to pick my ‘new’ family’s mannerisms, to make it seem like I was never kidnapped, but I was also mourning my old family. When I was a child, I felt like I had two moms. It wasn’t until I was 11 or 12 years old that the reality finally set in.”

But Delimar has no desire to speak to Correa again, nor does she feel she needs closure on that part of her life. "I don’t feel like I need to sit down and have that conversation with [Correa] because I learned a lot of things about Carolyn and how her mind works,” Delimar explained, “and I don’t know if it is going to be the truth.”

Cuevas and Delimar, who is now married and has an 11-year-old son of her own, are telling their stranger-than-fiction story in the new Fremantle documentary The Hand That Robbed the Cradle.