A baby girl who went missing in Phoenix in 1994 has been found alive and well after 24 years.
Police had been searching for Aleacia Stanci for nearly a quarter-century when an age-progression photo linked the case to a woman in Connecticut.
In December of 1994, Aleacia’s mother Toni gave the then-nine-month-old to a family friend saying that she needed a few days to ‘clear her head’, according to AZFamily.com.
When Toni returned two days later, no one could say where the infant had ended up.
Aleacia Stanci went missing at just nine months old in Phoenix, Arizona (left). She was found alive and well in Connecticut 24 years later with help from an age-progression image (right)
Aleacia was said to have been passed from friend to friend until she was ultimately handed over to police, who had no way of identifying her at the time.
Her mother, an Air Force veteran who struggled with drug use and was involved in prostitution, ended up in jail soon after she returned and didn’t report her daughter missing until March 1995.
Authorities failed to link the missing persons case to the infant who was by then under the care of Child Protective Services.
That same year, Toni was found murdered, leaving investigators without a single witness in the case.
Aleacia’s mother Toni is pictured in an undated mugshot. She was murdered in 1995
The case warmed back up in 2008 after cold-case detectives reviewed the information available with help from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
They gathered information and DNA from family members to develop a profile for the missing girl.
Software was also used to create age-progression photos depicting what she may look like now.
Six years down the road in 2014, a woman was checked into a hospital in Connecticut without any ID, drawing suspicion from a nurse who found the age-progression photo in the national missing person database and contacted police.
Police took the woman’s DNA for testing, and three years later it was matched to the missing baby.
Authorities determined that there was no foul play in the baby’s disappearance and the case was closed.
The 24-year-old was adopted as a child and now goes by a different name.
She reportedly met with her biological grandmother, Frances Ford, who told AZFamily.com that the young adult wants to keep her life private.
‘I would want the world to know that these are the things that can happen to kids, and not every story is not a happily-ever-after, and it doesn’t mean that they came from someone who didn’t want them or didn’t care,’ said Ford, who is currently living in Georgia.