A Baby Vanished in a Fire—6 Years Later, She Was Found Alive with Another Family

On December 15, 1997, a fire broke out at a two-story row house in Philadelphia’s Fentonville neighborhood. Luzaida Cuevas and two of her children managed to make it out of the home, but they couldn’t save 10-day-old Delimar Vera. When authorities searched the house in the aftermath of the blaze, the baby was nowhere to be found, leading them to assume she had been incinerated.

However, a little more than six years later, the truth came out. Vera wasn’t dead—she was alive and well, living with another family just 15 miles away under the name Aaliyah Hernandez. 

The culprit, investigators alleged, was 42-year-old Carolyn Correa, a mother of three and a cousin by marriage of Vera’s father, Pedro Vera, who lived in the Philadelphia suburb of Willingboro, N.J. According to prosecutors, Correa had concocted an elaborate scheme to kidnap Vera and pass her off as her own daughter.

Baby Vera was asleep in an upstairs bedroom when the fire broke out. But when Cuevas, her mother, ran in to save the newborn, her crib was empty and the window was open, despite it being a chilly winter night. Eventually, the heat and smoke forced Cuevas to give up the search and run to safety.

Though authorities determined that Vera had perished in the blaze, which they officially ruled had been started by an overheated extension cord attached to a space heater, Cuevas never felt fully convinced. For years, she held out hope that her baby girl was out there somewhere, still alive.

That conviction resurfaced at a child’s birthday party in January 2004, where she encountered a 6-year-old girl named Aaliyah Hernandez.

“I saw her smile, and I saw the dimple,” Cuevas told the Courier-Post in March 2004. “I said: ‘That’s my daughter.’ I was sure. I felt it so much in my heart.”

Acting on her hunch, Cuevas told the girl she had gum in her hair so she could extract a few strands. DNA testing confirmed her suspicions: the little girl was her long-lost daughter.

Prosecutors initially charged the woman posing as the girl’s mother, Correa, with arson, kidnapping, assault, concealing the whereabouts of a child and interfering with the custody of a child. But a judge later dropped the arson charge because there was not sufficient evidence to establish that the blaze had been deliberately set. 

Correa pleaded no contest and was sentenced to nine to 30 years in prison in September 2005. Investigators always suspected that Correa had at least one accomplice, but they never charged anyone else in connection with the crime. Correa claimed the girl’s birth father, Pedro Vera, gave her the baby on the day of the fire, but he denied any involvement.

Authorities never fully unraveled Correa’s motives. Theories ranged from a desperate desire to have a baby after a purported miscarriage to underlying mental health issues. 

Andre Moore, Correa’s boyfriend at the time of the fire, was convinced Correa had been pregnant with their child; at one point, he even pressed his ear against her stomach and felt the baby kicking. Correa’s relatives said that she had given birth to the baby at home on December 12, three days before she was alleged to have kidnapped Vera. But it’s unclear whether Correa was actually pregnant and, if so, what might have happened to that child. 

Correa was also so convinced that Vera was her biological child that she paid for her own DNA test and became hysterical when she learned the baby was not hers.

“She told me, ‘Where’s my baby, Mary Lou? I thought for six years Aaliyah was my baby. If Aaliyah’s not my baby, who has mine?’” Mary Lou Puchales, her best friend, told the Philadelphia Daily News in March 2004.

Prior to the kidnapping, Correa admitted to starting a fire in November 1996 at a medical office in Hamilton Township, N.J., to cover up the fact that she’d been stealing checks. She was sentenced in August 1998 to five years of probation and community service for that crime. 

“You didn't have to be Dick Tracy to solve this one,” Michael Luber, Pedro Vera’s attorney, told the New York Daily News in 2004.

Correa was paroled in March 2013, according to the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections.

Meanwhile, after her true identity was discovered, Vera was briefly placed in foster care in New Jersey before being reunited with her birth mother in March 2004. The transition was difficult for Vera, who was uprooted from the only life she had ever known and expected to accept a new family and new name. The challenges were compounded by the fact that she spoke only English, while her birth parents spoke mainly Spanish.

“For a really long time, I almost thought this new life was temporary,” she told the Guardian in 2024. “I had one photo of me with my old siblings on a beach and I’d look at it and think, ‘Oh, I’m going to go back and see them again.’ The media images showed me and my new family hugging and kissing. The public response was, ‘Let’s take photos!’ ‘Let’s do movies!’ but there was no support, no therapy, no resources. Nobody ever sat us down and said, ‘Are you OK? Do you need help?’” 

The rest of Vera’s childhood and adolescent years were difficult. Her parents had split up during the years she was missing, so she bounced back and forth between the two homes and eventually ended up back in foster care. As a teenager, she lived in a dangerous Philadelphia neighborhood with an abusive, gun-toting boyfriend. Meanwhile, the case continued to captivate the public, fueled by media coverage and retellings like Lifetime's Little Girl Lost: The Delimar Vera Story dramatization and The Hand That Robbed the Cradle documentary series.

Then, in 2018, Vera met the man who would become her husband, Isaiah Robinson. The two married in 2023 and now live a quiet life in Philadelphia with her stepson, a dog and a cat. In recent years, Vera has also become much closer with her biological family, especially her mom.

“We have a great relationship,” she told The Sun in 2024. “We’re stronger than ever right now.”