A North Carolina mom who left home 24 years ago for a Christmas shopping trip and never returned has been found alive and safe.
Michelle Hundely 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, the Rockingham County Sheriff’s Office said. She never returned, and her husband reported her missing more than three weeks later on December 31.
The sheriff’s office pulled in investigators from two states as well as federal agents, but no sign of Smith was ever found.
But on February 19, new information came into investigaors, and the next day detectives made contact with the missing woman, who was, they said, “ata n undisclosed location within North Carolina alive and well.”
“At her request, her current whereabouts will remain undisclosed,” the sheriff’s office said. “Her family has been notified that she has been located and informed of this request as well.”
Information about why Smith left and never contacted her family was not available, and one of her children posted to a Facebook page dedicated to finding her that for now, that didn’t matter.
“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.”
Amanda also noted that her father had been accused of being involved in her mother’s disappearance but “has been proven innocent.”
“Ofcourse I never thought he was… Even when I would ponder it for a second, bc I pondered so many different scenarios, I always knew that there was no way that he could do something like that for many reasons and the biggest being bc my father could never continue to lie to us for decades,” she wrote.
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[Featured image: Michelle Hundely Smith/Facebook]
