Northeast
7 stories of children who were kidnapped, survived their abductions and were reunited with their families
Hundreds of thousands of young children have fallen victim to a kidnapping.
In the United States alone, a child goes missing or is abducted every 40 seconds, according to the Child Crime Prevention & Safety Center.
About 840,000 people go missing every year, of which 85% to 90% are estimated to be children, according to the FBI.
These United States kidnapping cases are stories of individuals who were captured as young children, but eventually found their way back to their families days, weeks, months and years after they were taken.
Many of those who were kidnapped as children now, in their adult lives, share their stories with others and are involved in advocacy work around missing children. (Sylvain Gaboury/Patrick McMullan via Getty Images)
4 SHOCKING TRUE CRIME MYSTERIES THROUGHOUT HISTORY, FROM THE ‘ZODIAC KILLER’ TO THE ‘BLACK DAHLIA’
- Melissa Highsmith
- Elizabeth Smart
- Jaycee Dugard
- Carlina White
- Kara Robinson Chamberlain
- Alicia Kozakiewicz
- Ben Ownby and Shawn Hornbeck
1. Melissa Highsmith
Melissa Highsmith was reunited with her family in November 2022 after being separated for over 50 years.
According to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, the family had moved to the Fort Worth area and were in need of a babysitter. Highsmith’s mother placed an ad in the local paper seeking one.
A woman responded to the ad and on August 23, 1971, the babysitter picked up Highsmith from her mother’s apartment, where a roommate had been watching her, and she was never seen by the family again, until November 2022.
In November 2022, after many efforts by the family to find Highsmith, they submitted DNA to 23andMe, where matches came back of three children of a couple named John and Melanie Brown.
Melanie, who turned out to be Melissa, was still living in Fort Worth, Texas.
“One of our sisters called her daughter – the youngest one – and her daughter led us to her mom,” Jeff Highsmith, Melissa’s younger brother, told Fox News Digital in November 2022.
Melissa reconnected with her family after 51 years on Nov. 22, 2022.
FOUND: MELISSA HIGHSMITH’S FAMILY ‘OVERJOYED’ AFTER BEING REUNITED WITH SISTER ABDUCTED IN 1971
2. Elizabeth Smart
Elizabeth Smart was abducted from her family’s Salt Lake City home when she was 14 years old on June 5, 2002, by Brian Mitchell.
Her sister, Mary Katherine Smart, who shared a room with her, was the only witness to the kidnapping, and woke her parents a couple of hours after the crime was committed when she felt it was safe to do so, according to History.com.
When questioned by an officer while out, Smart eventually revealed her identity and was reunited with her family in March 2003.
KIDNAPPING SURVIVOR ELIZABETH SMART ON EMPOWERING KIDS FROM PREDATORS: ‘DON’T BE AFRAID TO PRACTICE SCREAMING’
In 2009, Smart testified that she was drugged, starved, tied to a tree and raped as often as four times a day while she was in captivity.
Smart’s captor was sentenced to life in prison after being convicted on kidnapping charges. His wife, Wanda Breeze, also went to prison and was released after 15 years.
Elizabeth Smart is now an inspirational speaker and an author. (Bennett Raglin/Getty Images for Lifetime)
Today, Smart is married to Matthew Gilmour and she is a mother of three. She is an inspirational speaker and is a published author with two books, “My Story” and “Where There’s Hope.”
“Your safety should always be a priority,” Smart said in an interview with Fox News Digital in December 2022. “And trust your gut. No matter what it is. If it’s a party, there will be another party. If it’s a date, and you don’t feel safe, don’t worry about offending your date. Your safety should be a priority. Don’t take chances when it comes to your safety.”
“Make sure you have a plan before you go meet up with someone that you’ve never met,” she continued. “Or maybe you have met someone and something happens. Think about what you would do in different scenarios. Talk about it with your family. Talk about it with your friends. Build your support network. Talk to them about what you’re doing. Let people be involved in your life.”
She also launched the mobile app “Guardian” with the Portland-based tech company Q5id that helps quickly locate missing children and adults nationwide.
3. Jaycee Dugard
Jaycee Dugard was held captive for 18 years.
When she was 11 years old, she was zapped by a stun gun at a bus stop near her home in South Lake Tahoe, California, in 1991.
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She was taken by Philip Garrido and his wife Nancy.
She was held hostage for 18 years, where she was repeatedly raped, according to CBS News. During her time in captivity, she gave birth to two of Garrido’s children, one when she was 14 and another when she was 17, according to the outlet.
Jaycee Dugard wrote a memoir in 2011 called “A Stolen Life.” (Andrew H. Walker/Getty Images)
Phillip and Nancy entered guilty pleas to the kidnapping of Dugard on April 28, 2011, according to the Crime Museum. Phillip, who was a registered sex offender before the kidnapping, received 431 years to life in prison, while Nancy received a sentence of 36 years behind bars.
Dugard published a memoir, “A Stolen Life,” in 2011 telling her story.
4. Carlina White
In August 1987, when Carlina White was 19 days old, she started to run a fever, so her parents Joy White and Carl Tyson, took her to Harlem Hospital in New York, according to ABC News.
A women named Ann Pettway, who was disguised as a nurse, kidnapped the baby and raised her under the alias Nejdra Nance.
As the girl aged, she began to become suspicious of her alleged mother. This led her to search the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children’s website in 2010, where she saw a baby photo similar to her own.
She was put in touch with her real mother, Joy White. DNA tests confirmed a match and the two were reunited after 23 years in January 2011.
Pettway was sentenced to 12 years behind bars.
5. Kara Robinson Chamberlain
In 2002, Kara Robinson Chamberlain was abducted by a serial killer named Richard Evonitz. She was playing at a friend’s house when she was approached by Evonitz, who put a gun to her neck, telling her to come with him, according to Chamberlain’s website.
SOUTH CAROLINA KIDNAPPING SURVIVOR KARA ROBINSON REVEALS TIPS FOR ESCAPING ABDUCTION
She was held captive and assaulted for 18 hours. She escaped when he was asleep, and went to law enforcement to give the details of the man who took her, according to the site.
After a high-speed chase in Sarasota, Florida, Evonitz shot himself, according to People.
Kara Robinson Chamberlain was abducted by serial killer Richard Evonitz from her friend’s yard in 2002. (Kara Robinson Chamberlain)
Today, Chamberlain is married and has two boys.
She has done a lot of advocacy work over the years, is co-host of the podcast “Survivor’s Guide to True Crime,” and was the focus of the 2023 movie “The Girl Who Escaped: The Kara Robinson Story” and the 2021 documentary, “Escaping Captivity: The Kara Robinson Story.”
6. Alicia ‘Kozak’ Kozakiewicz
Alicia ‘Kozak’ Kozackiewicz’s case was one of the first widely covered cases involving online predators.
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“I met somebody online who I thought was my friend, who could understand me,” Kozak recalled during a 2021 interview with Fox Nation host Tomi Lahren during an episode of “No Interruption.” “That’s what predators do. They look to find vulnerabilities in a child. And the next thing I knew, I was in a car, and this man was squeezing my hand so tightly that I thought he had broken it.”
Kozak’s abductor, whose name she won’t speak, according to Fox News Digital, took her from Pittsburgh to his home in Virginia. She was held captive for four days.
“He chained me to the floor with this dog collar next to the bed. I was raped and beaten and tortured in that house for four days,” Kozak told Fox News Digital in April 2023.
Alicia, at 13 years old, was rescued by FBI after four days with her captor. (Courtesy of Alicia “Kozak” Kozakiewicz)
On the fourth day of being held hostage, her attacker told her they were going to “go for a ride.”
“I knew in that moment there was nothing I could do,” Kozak told Fox News Digital. “I knew he was going to kill me.”
That same day, she heard banging on the door, which turned out to be the FBI. The FBI was brought to the location after someone saw a video of Kozak, which was livestreamed by her abductor, and recognized her from a missing person poster from the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. He called the police.
“I remember dragging that cold, heavy chain out, and trying to put my hands up but also trying to cover myself at the same time. I had no clothing on. I was staring at the end of a gun,” Kozak told Fox News Digital.
She was returned to her parents and spent the following years as a motivational speaker and has been an advocate for internet safety.
7. Ben Ownby and Shawn Hornbeck
Ben Ownby and Shawn Hornbeck were both kidnapped by the same man, Michael Devlin, who is now serving 72 life terms, according to the Crime Museum.
Hornbeck was 11 when he was kidnapped in Missouri while he was riding his bike to a friend’s house. He was held captive for four years. While he was missing, his parents set up a foundation to help look for missing children, called the Shawn Hornback Foundation, according to the source.
Devlin kidnaped a second child, Ben Ownby, on Jan. 8, 2007, and a neighbor gave the police a description of the suspicious white truck, which took them to the location of both boys, according to the Crime Museum.
Both of the children were reunited with their families. The finding of the two boys is referred to as the “Missouri Miracle.”
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But the story of the Poor Clares’ monastery — or as it’s known on the books of the Boston Planning Department, 920 Centre Street — is, at least for now, a case study on how housing doesn’t get built in this city.
It’s a story about how one midsized project with everything going for it — a world-class architect, a brilliant landscape designer, and a developer willing to make one compromise after another to the size and layout of the plan — still can’t move the needle in the face of one powerful opponent.
Well, make that one powerful opponent who has the ear of City Hall.
Faced with dwindling numbers in their order (they were down to 10 in 2022) and a Vatican mandate to consolidate, the sisters decided to sell their 2.8-acre parcel and the aging monastery building to developer John Holland. The building, which they had occupied since 1934, was expensive to heat and in need of extensive repairs.
They relocated to Westwood in 2023, hoping to expand those quarters to accommodate another 10 nuns from around the country as soon as the sale of the Jamaica Plain property became final, contingent on the approval of its redevelopment.
They’re still waiting.
The former monastery is neighbor to the Arnold Arboretum, land owned by the city but under a renewable 1,000-year lease to Harvard University. And no question, the 281-acre parcel is a tree-filled treasure for researchers and picnickers alike. Just try getting near the place on Lilac Sunday.
But the Arboretum, or rather its director, William Friedman, a Harvard evolutionary biology professor, has emerged as a powerful foe.
“The development has been part of the city’s planning process for nearly five years and has undergone several revisions,” Sr. Mary Veronica McGuff, the order’s abbess, wrote in a letter to Mayor Michelle Wu in January and shared with the editorial board. “We are very disappointed to learn that the main obstacle is … the Arnold Arboretum.”
She revealed that the order had earlier offered to sell the property to the Arboretum, but was rebuffed.
“It’s upsetting that our progress is now being hindered by an institution that declined the opportunity to take stewardship of the land and is now making unreasonable demands for its redevelopment,” she said in the letter.
In fact, its market rate condo component, once slated to be five stories high, has been reduced to four stories. Those 38 senior rental units planned for the monastery building will include 25 affordable units.
Project architect David Hacin, winner of the Boston Preservation Alliance’s 2022 President’s Award for Excellence, is equally bewildered.
“I don’t understand how a project that is so good on so many levels is being held up for years, literally, over asks that seem, to me, completely unreasonable,” Hacin told Globe business reporter Catherine Carlock. “If we can’t build five-story buildings, how are we going to solve the housing crisis?”
How indeed.
The developers have done shadow studies, a sunlight analysis, and tree root studies to convince Arboretum officials that the planned housing would do no damage to the magnolia tree roots on the perimeter of Harvard’s grounds, which seem to be their main bone of contention.
The project’s landscape architect Mikyoung Kim has surely not acquired her international reputation for “ecological restoration” by murdering magnolia trees.
Friedman has met with Boston’s planning chief, Kairos Shen, but as of Thursday the sisters have not yet been granted a similar opportunity. Nor have they heard from either Wu or Shen (who was copied in on the Jan. 12 letter) since they made their appeal for help “in finding a solution that allows this project to move forward and for our community to finally settle into our new home.”
In a statement to the Globe editorial board, Wu said, “Large properties like 920 Centre Street are significant housing sites for Boston, and we are working actively with all parties to advance a plan that would deliver homes our city needs.”
For the past year, experts have been warning that the slumping number of building permits in Greater Boston — down 44 percent last year from four years ago — do not bode well for an increase in the future housing supply. That dearth in supply is driving up prices and rents.
And while the Wu administration is quick to blame President Trump’s tariffs and rising costs for the construction slump, it fails to look in the mirror. Enabling the kind of Not In My Back Yard obstructionism that is keeping a good project on the drawing boards for years will never get Boston the kind of housing it needs to keep pace with demand and allow this city to thrive.
Editorials represent the views of the Boston Globe Editorial Board. Follow us @GlobeOpinion.
Two parents are facing charges after police say more than 60 teenagers were drinking at a large party in their Plum Borough home.
According to court paperwork, Ian and Corrine Dryburgh have been charged with endangering the welfare of children, corruption of minors, and furnishing liquor to minors stemming from the incident that happened at a home in Plum Borough late last month.
Police said that officers went to the home after receiving a tip about a large party involving high school aged children.
When officers arrived at the home, they found numerous teenagers, empty beer cans and empty seltzer cans, and multiple bottles of vodka.
The parents told police that a birthday party for their 17-year-old daughter got out of hand and that some kids has been kicked out, but more came and they didn’t know what to do.
According to the criminal complaint, officers said they had been called to the home two previous times for similar reasons.
Police said a total of 66 underage kids were at the home.
Court records show that both parents have been cited via summons and preliminary hearings are scheduled for mid-April.
Connecticut is set to receive more than $154 million aimed at improving health care in rural communities.
The funding comes from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ Rural Health Transformation Program, according to a community announcement.
The Connecticut Department of Social Services will lead the initiative, partnering with other state agencies to implement projects across four core areas: population health outcomes, workforce, data and technology, and care transformation and stability, according to the announcement.
The program will include several innovative projects, such as a mobile clinic pilot with four primary care and four dental vans, a health workforce pipeline through the Area Health Education Center and UConn Health Center, and community health navigators.
“Rural Connecticut has unique challenges, and its residents deserve the same access to high-quality care and support as anyone who lives anywhere else,” Lamont said. “This investment allows us to tackle those challenges head-on – from expanding mental health services and building a stronger health care workforce to modernizing our technology infrastructure and connecting residents to the services they need. This is about making sure every corner of Connecticut has the opportunity to thrive.”
The program was developed through extensive public engagement, including more than 250 written comments, meetings with health care providers, local government officials and community organizations, as well as in-person and virtual listening sessions held across the state, according to the announcement.
Andrea Barton Reeves, commissioner of the state Department of Social Services, highlighted the program’s long-term vision.
“This program reflects our commitment to building systems that work for rural residents over the long term,” she said in the release. “We are excited and grateful to CMS for this opportunity to make sure that our investments are coordinated, impactful, and built to last.”
The program aims to bring health care closer to rural residents while supporting the workforce that provides care, said Dr. Manisha Juthani, commissioner of the state Department of Public Health.
“Every person in rural Connecticut deserves good health care close to home, and the people who provide that care deserve real support too,” Juthani said. “This funding helps us bring care to where people are and build the healthcare workforce our communities need. When we invest in both, we give everyone a better chance at staying healthy.”
Additional information about the Rural Health Transformation Program, including opportunities for public engagement, will be made available as implementation proceeds.
For more information, visit the Connecticut Department of Social Services website at ct.gov/dss.
This story was created with the assistance of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Journalists were involved in every step of the information gathering, review, editing and publishing process. Learn more at cm.usatoday.com/ethical-conduct.
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