Did Delimar Vera ever recover her kidnapped child?
Little Girl Found By Thomas Fields-Meyer Luz Cuevas Was Told That Her Baby Had Died in a Fire. Then She Saw Her at a Birthday Party—Five Years Later. The Story of Their Joyous Reunion Luzaida Cuevas was nervous as she prepared to meet her young daughter for only the second time in six years. When Cuevas arrived at the government office in southern New Jersey, where the March 4 reunion was to take place, 6-year-old Aaliyah was hiding under a table. But the little girl quickly sprang out—her arms opened wide for a hug—and yelled “Surprise!” “She kissed me and said, ‘You’re my mommy,’ ” recalls Cuevas, 31. “I held her like a baby. Could you imagine? It was incredible.” All the more so because little Aaliyah—or Delimar as she was once known—was long assumed dead. The tale of how mother and daughter were separated and finally reunited is the stuff of a Hollywood screenplay. It began on Dec. 14, 1997, when a woman named Carolyn Correa visited the Philadelphia home Cuevas shared with her then
Luzaida Cuevas was nervous as she prepared to meet her young daughter for only the second time in six years. When Cuevas arrived at the government office in southern New Jersey, where the March 4 reunion was to take place, 6-year-old Aaliyah was hiding under a table. But the little girl quickly sprang out—her arms opened wide for a hug—and yelled “Surprise!” “She kissed me and said, ‘You’re my mommy,’ ” recalls Cuevas, 31. “I held her like a baby. Could you imagine? It was incredible.” All the more so because little Aaliyah—or Delimar as she was once known—was long assumed dead. The tale of how mother and daughter were separated and finally reunited is the stuff of a Hollywood screenplay. It began on Dec. 14, 1997, when a woman named Carolyn Correa visited the Philadelphia home Cuevas shared with her then-boyfriend Pedro Vera. A distant cousin of Vera’s, Correa, now 42, said she had come to see if he could fix the brakes on her car. Cuevas had never seen Correa before. But the next day
