Following the two-day sentencing hearing for Gloria Williams, the woman who kidnaped Kamiyah Mobley from a Jacksonville hospital in 1998, Mobley's attorney spoke on Kamiyah's behalf.
Kamiyah "has gotten a real Social Security number," attorney Justin Bamberg said with a smile. Mobley starts her new job in South Carolina on Monday. Bamberg said she will be working with people. She has chosen to be called Kamiyah Mobley on her official paperwork.
But she doesn't mind being called Alexis, either.
"She has accepted her hybrid type presence, so to speak," Bamberg said.
He said the process of getting a Social Security number was arduous because in order to get one, you have to prove who you are. Kamiyah had a hard time because her birth certificate states she is Kamiyah, where all other paperwork states that she is Alexis Manigo, the name she was given by Williams.
She will soon take her driver's license exam. “She’s excited about it. She wants to have the most regular life she can and just pick up and keep going," he said.
Mobley has expressed wanting to build a relationship with her biological parents but she wants to maintain a relationship with Gloria Williams.
“She has expressed an intent in being able to talk to Ms. Williams to write her and speak with her and as well as who she calls her grandparents and bothers. That was one thing that did make her feel some type of way, was when the state prosecutor went and said your ‘fake family' or whatever the terminology was the feeling that a person develops for other people it’s real to her, right?" Bamberg said. "And it’s easy to say, well it’s created on fraudulent grounds, but she was 8 hours old. No one can tell her or convince her that the young man she has called brother her entire life is not her brother. She just happens to now have some blood-related siblings that she gets to call brother and sister.”
As for how Kamiyah is handling all this change in her life, Bamberg said, "She’s handling it with a degree of gangster about her."