She Was Declared Dead at 10 Days Old — Six Years Later, Her Mother Found Her Alive

She Was Declared Dead at 10 Days Old — Six Years Later, Her Mother Found Her Alive

For six years, Luz Cuevas was told that her newborn daughter, Delimar Vera, had died in a Philadelphia house fire. But something about the official story never felt right to her.

On December 15, 1997, a fire broke out inside the family's rowhouse in Philadelphia. The blaze was extinguished in roughly ten minutes, but the second-floor bedroom where 10-day-old Delimar had been sleeping was badly damaged. Cuevas told firefighters that her baby's crib was empty and that the bedroom window had been open despite the freezing December weather. No body was ever recovered. Investigators initially believed the infant's remains had been completely destroyed by the intense heat and concluded that an extension cord connected to a space heater had caused the fire.

Cuevas refused to accept that her daughter was gone. Then, in January 2004, six years after the fire, she attended a family birthday party and noticed a six-year-old girl named Aaliyah. The child looked so familiar that Cuevas became convinced she was looking at Delimar.

 

She needed proof. Pretending that the girl had gum caught in her hair, Cuevas quietly pulled several strands of the child's hair and saved them. DNA testing later confirmed what she had believed for six years: Aaliyah was Delimar Vera, her biological daughter.

The woman who had been raising the child was Carolyn Correa of Willingboro, New Jersey. Correa surrendered to authorities in March 2004 after police began investigating the case. Prosecutors initially accused her of kidnapping the infant and setting the fire, but the arson charge was eventually dropped because investigators could not establish conclusively that the fire had been deliberately set.

Correa ultimately pleaded no contest to kidnapping, interfering with parental custody and conspiracy. In September 2005, she was sentenced to nine to 30 years in prison. During the sentencing, she claimed that Delimar's father, Pedro Vera, had given her the baby, but he denied the accusation. Investigators believed Correa may have had help, but no other person was charged in connection with Delimar's disappearance.

Delimar was eventually reunited with her biological parents. What had been recorded for years as the death of a 10-day-old baby had become something completely different: a kidnapping that remained hidden until a mother's instinct led her to recognize her own daughter six years later.