6-Year-Old Girl Found Years After Thought Dead, Neightbor Sought

[Brent]

Unbelievable, just absolutely unbelievable. I can only imagine the heartache the real mother went through. :(

PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) - A 6-year-old girl thought to have died in a fire as an infant has been found alive after being raised by a woman who may have set the blaze and abducted the baby, authorities said.
DNA tests confirmed on Monday that Delimar Vera is the biological daughter of Luz Cuevas, who recognized her daughter by her dimples in a chance meeting at a birthday party in Philadelphia two months ago.

"When she smiled she had eye dimples and when she was a baby she had dimples," Cuevas told CN8 TV.

The woman who raised Delimar, Carolyn Correa, 41, of Willingboro, New Jersey, was being sought by police. She is charged with 15 offenses, including kidnapping, aggravated assault and arson.

Police suspect Correa, thought to be distantly related to the girl's father, set the December 1997 fire in Philadelphia as a cover that would allow her to abduct the child.

Authorities at the time concluded that the 10-day-old baby's body had been consumed by the blaze.

Cuevas said she always suspected the girl did not die in the fire.

The child was in protective custody in New Jersey where officials planned to tell her that the woman who raised her for six years is not her mother, said Angel Cruz, a Pennsylvania state legislator who helped in the investigation.

[img src=http://wwwi.reuters.com/images/mdf486252.jpg" align="center]

Philadelphia police are looking for Carolyn Correa, 41, shown in this image released on March 2, 2004. A warrant has been issued for Correa, a New Jersey resident, who is suspected of arson in 1997 while she kidnapped 6-year-old Dalimar Vera from a longtime family friend's home when Vera was just an infant.

Cruz said Cuevas, 31, will be reunited with her daughter when the girl is judged to be emotionally prepared.

"We are not sure how the child is going to take this information," he said.

Cuevas, who has three sons, said she did not try to reclaim the child until she had proof that Delimar was her daughter. At the party, Cuevas obtained some of her daughter's hair, used for the DNA testing, by pretending to remove some chewing gum from it, said Cruz.