Mom Thought Her Baby Was Killed in House Fire. But She'd Really Been Kidnapped and Was Living 15 Miles Away

Mar. 15, 2025

Luz Cuevas, Delimar Vera.Photo:AP Photo/Joseph Kaczmarek

AP Photo/Joseph Kaczmarek

It started with a fire at the Philadelphia home of Luz Cuevas and Pedro Vera in December 1996.

The fire rampaged through the home and gutted the second-floor bedroom where the couple’s 10-day-old daughter Delimar was sleeping.

In a strange twist, six years later, Cuevas, who never believed her daughter died in the fire, was attending a birthday party when she saw a young girl named Aaliyah.

She was convinced the child was Delimar, according toTheGuardian.

“I have dimples and all of my siblings have dimples," Delimar, now 26, said in a recent interview with the U.K. daytime show,This Morning. “That was the first give away from her. She always says, ‘Blood calls’ so she could sense that I was hers.”

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Cuevas was confident in her mother’s intuition, so she slyly nabbed a strand of the child’s hair, brought it to police, and asked them to conduct a DNA test,TheGuardianreported.

Prior to the administration of the DNA test, Delimar has a distinct memory of the woman she believed to be her mother, Carolyn Correa, spraying “some kind of substance in my mouth,” she toldThis Morning. Delimar says she later learned the unknown substance was Correa’s saliva.

Luz Cuevas; Pedro Vera.Getty, AP Photo/Joseph Kaczmarek

Getty, AP Photo/Joseph Kaczmarek

DNA testing eventually confirmed that Delimar was the daughter of Cuevas. For six years, she’d been living with Correa and her family in Willingboro, N.J., just 15 miles away from her Philadelphia home,Timereported.

Soon, Delimar went back to Philadelphia to live with her mother. Correa was taken into custody and charged with kidnapping, perTheGuardian. She was ultimately convicted and sentenced to 30 years,per the Associated Press.

Delimar Vera.Delimar Vera/Instagram

Delimar Vera/Instagram

“At first it was really exciting,” Delimar said about the national attention the case garnered, perThis Morning. “All the cameras and the gifts but then it became too much having to go in our home through the backyard.”

Now, Delimar is telling her own story in the three-episode Fremantle documentaryThe Hand that Robbed the Cradle. In an interview withVarietyin advance of the film, Delimar says she “had a real identity crisis.”

“They said: ‘She’s back, it’s done, we have a happy ending. … I didn’t know who to be.”

“I tried to pick my ‘new’ family’s mannerisms, to make it seem like I was never kidnapped, but I was also mourning my old family. When I was a child, I felt like I had two moms. It wasn’t until I was 11 or 12 years old that the reality finally set in.”

Delimar struggled. At one point, she left her mother’s home and moved in with her father, who had separated from Cuevas, but after a fight with him, she ended up in a group home when she was 15, according toTheGuardian.

“For a long time, I felt unworthy, undeserving of certain things,” she toldThe Guardian.

Carolyn Correa.AP Photo/Joseph Kaczmarek

By the age of 20, she was “sick of feeling sorry for myself, of being a victim. You really come to realize that not everybody is going to feel as bad for you as you do for yourself," she toldThe Guardian. “You have to accept that and do better.”

Today, Delimar is married and lives with her husband Isaiah and her 11-year-old stepson in Philadelphia and still speaks with her father and mother multiple times a week, according toThe Guardian.

However, the question still remains: Why did Correa kidnap her? And did she have an accomplice?

“I don’t feel like I need to sit down and have that conversation with [Correa] because I learned a lot of things about Carolyn and how her mind works, and I don’t know if it is going to be the truth,” Delimar told This Morning.

Delimar Vera tells her own story in the three-episode Fremantle documentaryThe Hand that Robbed the Cradle.

source: people.com