Apr 23 2024
Family reunited with daughter after 51 years
Mon 05 Dec 2022
USA: A family was reunited with their daughter after 51 years and they urge other relatives of missing people to keep having faith.
Sharon Highsmith, whose 53-year-old sister, Melissa, met other members of her family and encouraged others to “never give up hope” and to “chase every lead.”
Melissa Highsmith was abducted in 1971 when she was 22 months old, the family, of Fort Worth, Texas, said. They identified the kidnapper as a babysitter whom her mom, Alta Apantenco, had hired.
They said Highsmith was found through the results of an at-home DNA test. Highsmith had been the focus of a search that lasted more than four decades. Her family didn’t see her again until this past weekend.
“I couldn’t stop crying,” Highsmith’s sister Victoria Garner said in a Facebook post quoted in the press release. She added, “I was overjoyed and I’m still walking around in a fog trying to comprehend that my sister is right in front of me and that we found her.”
The family said they found a match with Highsmith via an at-home DNA test on November 6, the day they held a birthday party in her honor, as they’d done every year since she went missing.
“It’s overwhelming and incredible to me,” Sharon Highsmith, 45, said. “We have worked with law enforcement and we’ve tried to do our own private family investigations.”
She added, “For decades, my parents have chased leads, hiring their own labs and investigators. And yet, these DNA tests, which are available to anyone, helped us find our lost loved one.”
The family credited Lisa Jo Schiele, a clinical laboratory scientist and amateur genealogist, who the release said “helped the family interpret the DNA results” and “mined” public records.
“This is not the hardest genealogy puzzle I’ve ever solved,” Schiele was quoted as saying. “I hope what I do gives other families the confidence to do the same.”
