My mother was told I’d died in a house fire at 10 days old. In fact, I was kidnapped

Delimar Vera spent her early years with the woman who snatched her. Then came a chance encounter with her real mother at a birthday party ...

When Delimar Vera was six years old, the woman she thought was her mother – Carolyn Correa – turned to her and said, “There’s a bad lady who wants to take you away from us, but you’re not going to let her, right?”

Vera promised she wasn’t going anywhere; she’d tell the “bad lady” to get off her. “I was a sassy kid,” she says now, 20 years on. Remembering that strange exchange still gives Vera chills. It was Correa herself that had taken Vera away, kidnapping her as a newborn, crossing over from Philadelphia to New Jersey, changing Delimar’s name to Aaliyah and raising her as her own. “It’s mind-blowing to think that the bad lady that Carolyn was talking about was actually my real mother,” she says.

My mother was told I’d died in a house fire at 10 days old. In fact, I was kidnapped

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