After more than two years, a 6-year-old girl has finally been found alive and safe.
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The search for the missing child began in 2019 after her biological parents, Kimberly Cooper and Kirk Shultis Jr., lost custody of both their children. The kids were given to a different relative, but the youngest went missing soon after.
Since then, police officers in New York have been following every lead in hopes that the little girl would be found unharmed.
Her biological parents were suspects from the start. Many leads took them to Kirk’s dad’s home, but with each visit, both Kirk Sr. and Kirk Jr. insisted they hadn’t seen the child since she went missing.
Officers attempted to search Kirk Sr.’s home, but since they only had limited access, they never found anything… that is, until recently.
Thanks to a very promising lead, officers were able to obtain a warrant that granted them access to a more thorough search of the residence. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary at first, but an officer with a keen eye noticed that something looked off about the staircase.
“It was just the way the steps felt when you walked on them … it just didn’t seem right to him,” Chief Joseph Sinagra said. “And then when he used a flashlight to look in between the cracks of the stair boards, he saw what he believed was a blanket.”
Officers quickly removed several of the steps, revealing a small, dirty space filled with blankets. In that makeshift room, they also discovered Kimberly along with the missing little girl.
“Our belief is that every time law enforcement and the authorities went to the residence looking for the child, that the child was put into that location, probably with Kimberly, to hide so that they would not be found,” Sinagra said.
Despite everything this poor child has been through, paramedics were happy to report that she’s in good health. Plus, she’s already back with her legal guardian and her older sister!
We can’t imagine what this child has been through, but we wish her well as she and the rest of her loved ones begin to heal and move forward from this ordeal.
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