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 ... W hen De

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

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2024-10-30 00:30:07

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 ...

W hen 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.

Talking from her home in Philadelphia, Vera, 26, tells me the story of her bizarre and traumatic childhood – part horror story, part fairytale, and still in many ways a mystery. It is the subject of a documentary premiering next month.

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