{"id":82527,"date":"2024-09-26T14:22:36","date_gmt":"2024-09-26T07:22:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/echowoven.com\/?p=82527"},"modified":"2024-09-26T14:22:36","modified_gmt":"2024-09-26T07:22:36","slug":"unresolved-for-two-decades-breakthrough-in-20-year-old-case","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/echowoven.com\/unresolved-for-two-decades-breakthrough-in-20-year-old-case\/","title":{"rendered":"Unresolved for two decades: Breakthrough in 20-year-old case"},"content":{"rendered":"

Lavona Solomon, a South African woman, was sentenced to 10 years in prison for kidnapping a three-day-old baby from the Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town in 1997.\n

The girl, who grew up believing Lavona and her husband Michael were her biological parents, was devastated over the fact that the woman who raised her was now behind bars. Not only she didn\u2019t hold any grudges against her, but she said she loved her even more knowing that she raised her even though she wasn\u2019t her real daughter.\n

This crushed the girl\u2019s biological parents, Celeste and Morne Nurse, who longed to be with their first-born daughter whom they found 17 years after she was taken away from them.\n

\n
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Zephany Nurse\n\n

The truth about the girl\u2019s, Zephany Nurse, whom Lavona named Mich\u00e9, true identity was only discovered after the Nurses second daughter, Cassidy, started attending the same school as Mich\u00e9.\n

Plenty of the teachers, as well as their classmates, noticed the uncanny resemblance between the two girls.\n

When Cassidy first noticed Mich\u00e9 at the school corridor, she was stunned. Soon after, the two girls became very good friends and even joked about being sisters in another life.\n

It wasn\u2019t until they took a selfie and showed it to their parents that the Nurses started questioning if Mich\u00e9 could be their long-lost daughter.\n

As soon as they learned that Mich\u00e9 was born on April 30, 1997, they alerted the authorities.\n
\n
\"\"
Celeste and Zephany Nurse\/ Paramount Plus\n\n

One day, Mich\u00e9 was called to the Principle\u2019s Office. There were two social workers who told her about the case of the abducted girl some 17 years ago. As the story unfolded, they told Mich\u00e9 they believed she was that girl and asked for a DNA test to be done. In the meantime, she wasn\u2019t allowed to return home to Lavorna and Michael, but was placed at a safe house until she turned 18 and could choose who to stay with.\n

When the DNA test results came in the following day, they revealed that Zephany and Mich\u00e9 were the same person. Lavorna was immediately arrested, and Michael was set free upon questioning. He was made to believe that Mich\u00e9 was indeed his biological daughter by his wife who faked her pregnancy after failing to conceive for years.\n

The reunion between Mich\u00e9 and her biological parents wasn\u2019t a straightforward process. Sadly, Mich\u00e9 didn\u2019t have any feelings for them but was sorry for the woman who kidnapped her.\n

Eventually, she accepted Celeste and Morne but never forgot the people who raised her. She still saw Michael as her father, and was heartbroken Lavorna was sentenced to prison.\n

\n
\"\"
Zephany\/ Mich\u00e9 \/ Paramount Plus\n\n

In the documentary\u00a0Girl, Taken,\u00a0the Nurses and Mich\u00e9 speak of their feelings and how the truth changed their lives.\n

Recalling the moment he met his first-born daughter after 17 years, Morne\u00a0said, \u201cIt was like \u2018wow.\u2019 I\u00a0had goosebumps and even when I speak about it today now, it feels like it happened yesterday.\n

\u201cAnd that same feeling when we did the documentary arose from down deep inside of me, it felt like that day I first met her.\u201d\n

It was in the documentary that Mich\u00e9 confessed discovering the truth made her love Solomon even more, which surprised the Nurses.\n

Today, Mich\u00e9 is a mother herself. Morne says that his and his wife\u2019s relationship with Mich\u00e9 and his granddaughter is \u201cgood.\u201d\n

\u201cI don\u2019t think we\u2019ll ever be where we need to be and I think it\u2019s going to take a lot of years for us to have our daughter where we need to have her. Finding a daughter at the age of 17, it\u2019s not an easy thing.\u201d\n

The good thing is that they are working on their relationship and can picture a future together.\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Lavona Solomon, a South African woman, was sentenced to 10 years in prison for kidnapping a three-day-old baby from the Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town in 1997. The girl, who grew up believing Lavona and her husband Michael were her biological parents, was devastated over the fact that the woman who raised her was …\n","protected":false},"author":30,"featured_media":82528,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[657],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-82527","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-love-and-relationships"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/echowoven.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82527","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/echowoven.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/echowoven.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/echowoven.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/30"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/echowoven.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=82527"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/echowoven.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82527\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":82530,"href":"https:\/\/echowoven.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82527\/revisions\/82530"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/echowoven.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/82528"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/echowoven.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=82527"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/echowoven.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=82527"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/echowoven.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=82527"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}