A lady who was kidnapped when she was a child has been reunited together with her household 51 years later.
Melissa Highsmith went lacking in 1971 when, at simply 22 months outdated, she was taken by a babysitter from her mother and father’ Fort Worth, Texas, dwelling.
Melissa’s mom Alta Apantenco was working as a waitress and in want of a babysitter so she put an commercial within the newspaper.
Ms Apantenco employed a girl who expressed curiosity within the job with out assembly her in individual.
While she was at work, her roommate handed Melissa over to a babysitter who allegedly kidnapped her and by no means returned.
According to the household, Ms Apantenco confronted years of accusations from investigators that she had probably killed her daughter and hidden the crime.
But the household by no means gave up of their seek for Melissa and in recent times they created a Facebook web page named Finding Melissa.
But the breakthrough got here once they used the web sites Ancestry and 23AndMe after taking recommendation from a genealogist.
“Every time my mother got her hopes up. After 51 years, she didn’t want to submit another DNA test. She was tired and she was hurt and guilty from carrying this all these years,” mentioned Victoria Highsmith, Melissa’s sister.
“I’m thankful that we got her to agree to submit her DNA … It is because of that, and my dad submitting, that we were able to find Melissa.”
Victoria mentioned they did not discover Melissa by means of her personal DNA pattern however by means of her youngsters’s DNA and that the match got here again rapidly after each of her mother and father submitted their samples.
“Within three weeks we found my sister. It was like, ‘Boom, boom, boom’, we found her,” mentioned Victoria.
Melissa, now 53, has been residing in Fort Worth for many of her life and by no means knew she had been kidnapped, her household wrote in posts on a Facebook web page named We Found Melissa!!!
On Saturday, throughout a celebration at a church, Melissa was reunited together with her mom, her father Jeffrie Highsmith and two of her 4 siblings.
“I couldn’t stop crying. I was overjoyed and I’m still walking around in a fog trying to comprehend that my sister is right in front of me and that we found her,” mentioned Victoria.
“It’s a Christmas miracle! It’s amazing meeting her. It was like looking into myself, she looks like me, like us. She’s overjoyed to be in our lives.”
Source: information.sky.com”