JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — An 18-year-old girl now living in Walterboro, S.C., has been identified as a child kidnapped from a hospital here hours after she was born in 1998, authorities said Friday.
The kidnapper, visible only on grainy hospital video, never was found. No photos of the child ever were taken.
Gloria Williams, 51, the woman who raised the child from infancy, was arrested and charged with kidnapping and interfering with custody, Jacksonville Sheriff Mike Williams said. She will be brought to Jacksonville to face charges but her first court appearance will be in Walterboro, about 200 miles north on Interstate 95 from Jacksonville, and is scheduled between 4 and 6 p.m. ET Friday .
PHOTOS: Baby kidnapped hours after birth found alive 18 years later
In the years since the kidnapping, more than 2,500 tips came in on the case, Mike Williams said.
"It is as complicated an investigation as you can imagine," he said. No other people are suspects in the case now.
Late last year, the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office received an initial tip that brought them to Walterboro. At that point investigators found the 18-year-old with different name than the kidnapped child, but other details meshed with previous findings.
A DNA sample confirmed that the girl is Kamiyah Mobley. Because the girl is now an adult, she will decide whether and when to be reunited with her birth family, which still lives in Jacksonville, Mike Williams said.
The name she was given and has been using for almost all of her life was not released. State Attorney Melissa Nelson said authorities have met with the girl's biological parents and are working with them as the case progresses.
For years, the trail to Kamiyah had become cold, one of just a handful of hospital kidnappings to remain unsolved.
On July 10, 1998, just eight hours after Kamiyah was born, a woman posing as a nurse entered Shanara Mobley's hospital room at University Medical Center, now University of Florida Health-Jacksonville. She told the newborn's mother that Kamiyah had a fever and it needed to be checked.
The woman then left the room, exited the hospital with the child and disappeared.
Nurses at the hospital thought the woman was a member of the Mobley family, The Florida Times-Union reported. They told investigators that they had seen her interact with Shanara Mobley hours before the abduction.
Shanara Mobley, who was a teenager herself when her daughter was born, told authorities that she thought the woman was a nurse. The suspect was wearing a smock and scrubs.
Police searched every room and floor of the hospital. The FBI and the Florida Department of Law Enforcement were also called to assist.
Surveillance video proved too grainy to identify the kidnapper and the camera in the nursery was broken. So law enforcement circulated a sketch of the suspect.
Baby Kamiyah also had had no photos take of her, so investigators told the public to look for a baby with an umbilical hernia, like a raised belly button, and bruising on her buttocks.
One year after infant went missing, authorities, who had offered a $250,000 reward, had more than 2,000 leads. The case also was featured on America's Most Wanted, but eventually all of the early leads amounted to nothing.
