Unable to arrest Michele Hundley Smith for skipping out on her family 24 years ago, North Carolina authorities opted to arrest her on a failure to appear warrant from a DWI charge the same year she disappeared.
Unlike the DWI itself, there’s no statue of limitations on a warrant, so Smith will have to appear in court on March 26, the Rockingham County Sheriff’s Office reported.
Smith, now 62, left home on December 9, 2001, to travel to a K-Mart in Martinsville, Virginia, 18 miles from her home in Eden, North Carolina, as CrimeOnline previously reported. She never returned, and her husband reported her missing more than three weeks later on December 31.
But on February 19, new information came into investigators, and the next day detectives made contact with the missing woman, who was, they said, “at an undisclosed location within North Carolina alive and well.”
“At her request, her current whereabouts will remain undisclosed,” the sheriff’s office said at the time. “Her family has been notified that she has been located and informed of this request as well.”
The sheriff’s office didn’t say why she left and never contacted her family — nor why her husband waited three weeks to report her missing. One of her children posted to a Facebook page dedicated to finding her that for now, none of that matters.
“As far as my opinions and feelings on my mom … I am ecstatic, I am pissed, I am heartbroken, I am all over the map!” her daughter Amanda wrote. “Will I have a relationship once more with my mom? Honestly I can’t answer that bc I don’t even know… My initial reaction would be yes absolutely but then I think of all the hurt… But even then … My mom is only human just as we all are.”
Family have not commented on Smith’s arrest.
The sheriff’s office said it worked with the District Attorney’s Office to find the warrant for Smith’s arrest. She was charged with the DWI on November 11, 2001 — a month before she disappeared — and failed to appear in court on December 27.
The Rockingham Sheriff’s Office had deputies in Robeson County arrest her on Wednesday, and she immediately posted her $2,000 bond.
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[Featured image: Michele Hundley Smith/Facebook]
