A 15-year-old Illinois girl allegedly kidnapped by her mother six years ago was found alive in North Carolina on Saturday, less than a year after her disappearance was featured on the Netflix series Unsolved Mysteries.
“I’m overjoyed that Kayla is home safe,” the girl’s father, Ryan Iskerka, said in a statement issued by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. “We ask for privacy as we get to know each other again and navigate this new beginning.”
Kayla Unbehaun was nine when she disappeared in 2017, while under the supervision of her mother, Heather Unbehaun, who did not have custody. Iskerka said he was supposed to retrieve Kayla from her mother on 5 July that year but they did not show up.
Unbehaun was required to bring Kayla to Iskerka pursuant to a court order, NBC News said. The girl was last seen with her mother the day before the planned exchange, after a 4 July parade.
Police said Heather Unbehaun was last spotted packing up her belongings and attaching them to the roof of her car. Relatives said Heather went camping in Wisconsin. When the pair did not arrive for the handover, Iskerka called police.
“It was discovered that all of Heather’s social media had been canceled and her phone turned off,” Iskerka said on a GoFundMe page, explaining that he filed a missing person report.
A few weeks earlier, Unbehaun had missed a court date.
“Her lawyer had not talked to her for days, was unaware of what happened and was very concerned,” Iskerka said.
Prosecutors in Kane county, Illinois issued an arrest warrant for Unbehaun shortly after she and Kayla went missing, NBC Chicago said.
In November last year, the disappearance was among several alleged family abduction cases discussed in an episode of Unsolved Mysteries.
Last week, NBC News said, a woman at a consignment shop in Asheville, North Carolina, recognized Unbehaun from “published media” and called authorities.
Asheville police arrested Unbehaun on Saturday and she was set to be extradited to Illinois. It was not known whether she had a lawyer, NBC said.
Kayla was in the custody of North Carolina social services, set to be reunited with her family in Illinois, NBC said. Iskerka reportedly said the ordeal had been “really devastating”.
According to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, family abduction cases are when children are “taken, wrongfully retained, or concealed by a parent or other family member depriving another individual of their custody or visitation rights”.
Of nearly 30,000 cases logged with the center in 2020, almost 5% were family abductions. The same year, more than 60% of amber alerts, emergency messages sent to help locate missing persons, mostly children, involved alleged family abductions.
