Luz Cuevas Insisted Her Baby Didn’t Die in a Fire—and She Was Right
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Luz Cuevas didn’t believe her daughter was dead.
On the night of Dec. 15, 1997, a fire broke out in the Philadelphia home she shared with Pedro Vera and their daughter Delimar Vera, who was 10 days old. And within minutes, her baby was gone.
Luz said in interviews years later that she told first responders she went to get the infant out of her crib and she wasn’t there.
But the official fire report stated, per the Philadelphia Inquirer: “DOA 1 female approximately 1 week old.”
No death certificate was ever issued for Delimar because no remains were found, according to authorities. But investigators chalked it up to the force of the blaze, which the fire report noted was caused by “electrical wires; improper use of homemade extension cord.” The medical examiner’s office concluded that the infant had “been completely consumed by the fire.”
Luz, however, suspected that someone had taken her daughter.
She told the Associated Press in 2004 that the police and firefighters said “maybe it was my nerves.”
But Luz never stopped believing that her daughter was alive. And it turned out she was right.
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How did Luz Cuevas find out her daughter was alive?
On Jan. 24, 2004, Luz was at a child’s birthday party thrown by a relative on Pedro’s side of the family, when she saw a little girl who stopped her in her tracks.
“I looked at her. She walked in front of me,” Luz told Philadelphia’s NBC 10 in March 2004. “She looked at me. I looked at her. I said to my sister, ‘That is my daughter. She got my daughter.’ My sister said, ‘You have to take it easy. You need proof. We have to find proof.'”
Like a true crime aficionado, she pretended to spot gum in the girl’s hair and snipped five strands from her head, which she wrapped in a napkin and put in a plastic bag.
“Because of TV,” Luz told the AP, “I knew they needed hair for the DNA.”
She then went to the office of her local state representative, Angel Cruz, for help.
The legislator was admittedly skeptical of her story. “Not that I didn’t believe her,” he told the New York Times in 2004. “It was just a little bit difficult to digest.'”
But after an hour-long conversation, he was swayed by what he called her “mother intuition” and contacted Philadelphia police on her behalf. They got in touch with authorities in New Jersey—where the child was living with the woman she thought was her mother—and they got the DNA testing underway.
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On March 1, 2004, Luz found out that the girl from the party was, in fact, Delimar.
“I screamed, I felt so happy,” Luz told NBC 10. “I don’t know what to say. Cry? You know, because I was in shock when they say, ‘It’s your daughter.'”
The next day, Carolyn Correa—a cousin of Pedro’s by marriage—turned herself into Philadelphia police and was charged with kidnapping, arson, assault, concealing the whereabouts of a child and interfering with the custody of a child.
What really happened to Delimar Vera?
Carolyn was visiting Pedro and Luz’s home on the night of Dec. 15, 1997, when she took Delimar out of her crib and set the fire in the girl’s bedroom to cover her tracks, police said after her arrest.
Luz said in pretrial testimony, per the Tampa Bay Times, that Carolyn had gone upstairs to use the bathroom. About 10 minutes after she came back down, Luz heard a loud pop from the second floor. When she ran upstairs, Luz said, smoke and flames were coming from Delimar’s room. She said she saw that the baby’s crib was empty and the window was wide open.
The Puerto Rican-born Luz told reporters in 2004 that, speaking in Spanish, she tried to tell the firefighters that her daughter wasn’t in her room but no one listened.
State Rep. Cruz said on Good Morning America at the time that there may have been a language barrier that prevented the first responders from fully understanding her.
Vincent Heeney, the fire marshal in 1997 but since retired, told the Philadelphia Daily News in 2004 that Luz spoke to Spanish-speaking firefighters that night and she said that her daughter was in the room but smoke had prevented her from going in. (A lawsuit Luz filed against the city of Philadelphia and multiple officials, including Heeny and the medical examiner, in which she alleged her family’s right to due process was violated, was dismissed in 2006.)
Meanwhile, Carolyn had renamed the child Aaliyah (after the pop star) Hernandez and was raising the girl as her own barely 15 miles away in Willingboro, N.J.
While living with Carolyn, the girl went to private school and was getting modeling and acting jobs, appearing in a toy commercial and on an episode of Blue’s Clues.
But after Luz found Delimar, members of the Vera family said they had suspected that the girl wasn’t really Carolyn’s child.
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“It’s a crazy story—just like a movie,” cousin Alison Vera told New Jersey’s Courier Post. “We told my cousin Pedro about it, but nothing ever happened. Nothing was done. I don’t know why.”
Pedro said Carolyn introduced Aaliyah to him at the same 2004 birthday party where Luz made the connection.
“I got the feeling that was my daughter because she looked like me,” he told NBC 10. “A lot of years, I think she’s dead.”
When did Luz Cuevas get her daughter Delimar back?
Luz and Pedro were awarded legal custody of their daughter on March 5, 2004, per the AP, and three days later Luz picked up Delimar from a state family services office in Burlington County, N.J. (By then, the mother of two boys from a previous relationship also shared a 4-year-old son with Pedro, but they were no longer together.)
Luz’s attorney Alexander Murphy Jr. told the AP at the time that his client was “taking a very private approach” to the reunion, explaining, “It’s been exhausting for her and for everyone, and she just wants to be able to focus completely on her daughter.”
According to Carolyn’s attorney Jeffrey C. Zucker, per the Los Angeles Times, Delimar screamed when child welfare authorities picked her up from the lawyer’s office and took her away from the woman she knew as her mom. But Luz’s attorney Anthony Cianfrani said that, when Delimar was reunited with her biological mother and father after a court hearing, she perched under a table and popped out to yell “Surprise!”
“And after that,” the lawyer said, “it kept getting better. It went really well.”
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Luz said that she was working on her English, as that was the only language her daughter grew up with, and that she’d start off still using Aaliyah as a nickname.
“Little by little, I will call her Delimar,” Luz said. “Her real name is Delimar.”
Back at her house, a beaming Luz told reporters through an open window that she was “very happy,” while Delimar said, “I feel like I’m at my real home.” Asked what she planned to do, the 6-year-old said, “I’m going to get pizza and play with my brothers.”
Luz’s lawyer said a few months later that Delimar was out of the acting and modeling business for the time being, telling the Tampa Bay Times, “Luz wants her to sever ties with the New Jersey life and is just committed to doing whatever is necessary to make the transition go well.”
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What happened to Carolyn Correa?
After her March 2004 arrest, Carolyn’s bail was set at $1 million and, a month later, she was still in jail.
“There are facts in this case that change every time you go to look at them and they don’t make sense,” her lawyer Zucker told the Philadelphia Daily News in April 2004. “So either someone is hiding something or someone is lying. But the truth has yet to come out and we hope to get to that.”
But ultimately Carolyn pleaded no contest to kidnapping, interference of child custody and conspiracy in February 2005, according to Fox News.
At a sentencing hearing that September, her attorneys maintained that she had suffered from a psychotic condition that caused her to believe she was pregnant and she truly thought Delimar was hers.
In a brief statement, Carolyn apologized for “the confusion” and told the judge that the girl’s father, Pedro, had given her the baby. “I loved her as my own,” she said. “I truly believed she was mine.”
Judge Pamela Dembe, calling the defendant’s actions “truly monstrous,” sentenced her to nine to 30 years in prison. And because she never admitted wrongdoing, the judge said, per the Philadelphia Daily News, “I don’t truly have the sense that Ms. Correa has fully accepted the responsibility for what she’s done.”
The judge also acknowledged in court that if Carolyn had an accomplice, that person remained unknown. Investigators believed she had help removing Delimar from the house, but prosecutors had said there wasn’t evidence to file charges against anyone else.
“We’re happy now. We got our daughter back,” Pedro said after court, per Fox News. As for what Carolyn had said about him in court, he said, those are “crazy things that she’s talking about.”
In a 2005 jailhouse interview, Carolyn said she was “a loving person,” not the monster she was painted to be.
“If I could do something for you, I’d do it,” she told the Daily News. “I could have two soups in my bins—and even though I know I have to eat tomorrow—I’d give away that soup.”
Carolyn, now 63, was paroled in March 2013, according to the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections’ inmate locator.
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Where is Delimar Vera now?
While the story of what happened to Delimar as a baby has been told time and again, including in the 2008 Lifetime movie Little Girl Lost, only recently has she spoken out about her entire complicated journey.
“When I got to the party, we were all hanging out downstairs, and that’s when I saw my mother for the first time,” Delimar, now 26, recalled of seeing Luz for the first time in the 2024 Fremantle docuseries The Hand That Robbed the Cradle. “I just thought, ‘Oh, my god, look at this beautiful woman.’ I just gravitated towards her, I don’t know why. I was just so intrigued.”
The woman “kept smiling at me and we kept looking at each other,” she continued. “Of course, I didn’t know in that moment that we had any relation to one another.”
Delimar remembered the woman pulling hair out of her head, but then Carolyn rushed her out of the party.
“I remember being home with Carolyn,” Delimar said in the series, “and her telling me, ‘There’s this bad woman that wants to take you away from us,’ and I told her, ‘I’m not going to [let her] do that.'”
Delimar Vera, Luz Cuevas, Judy Reyes, Jillian Bruno (Angela Weiss/WireImage)0
At the time, she was “a sassy kid,” Delimar told The Guardian ahead of the series’ Nov. 4 premiere in the U.K. (where it was released as Back From The Dead: Who Kidnapped Me?). “It’s mind-blowing to think that the bad lady that Carolyn was talking about was actually my real mother.”
Living as Aaliyah, she had a pretty big extended family, she recalled, and “Carolyn is the one I remember least. I think trauma has a way of blocking certain people out of your life.”
Moving back in with her real mom wasn’t easy, she acknowledged, and she “hated” the name Delimar at first.
“For a really long time, I almost thought this new life was temporary,” she told the publication. “I had one photo of me with my old siblings on a beach and I’d look at it and think, ‘Oh, I’m going to go back and see them again.’ The media images showed me and my new family hugging and kissing. The public response was, ‘Let’s take photos!’ ‘Let’s do movies!’ but there was no support, no therapy, no resources.”
By the time she was 12, she and Luz weren’t getting along, Delimar continued. “I started to spiral and fall into a depression—but in my mum’s culture, those kind of emotions don’t exist,” she said. “You suck it up and keep on moving.”
She tried staying with her dad, she said, but they fought and she spent her 15th birthday in a group home. She got odd jobs and bounced from place to place, but by 19 she was living with an abusive boyfriend, feeling that she was “unworthy, undeserving of certain things.”
When she was 20, however, she left the toxic relationship and started getting her life together. “Something shifted, and I think I just got sick of myself,” Delimar said. “I was sick of feeling sorry for myself, of being a victim.”
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She met her future husband, Isaiah Robinson, in 2018 and she’s stepmom to his now-11-year-old son.
“My experience has definitely made me more protective of my family,” Delimar said in the docuseries. “And I have post-traumatic stress disorder, so meeting my husband, I had to unlearn a lot of things that were actually trauma responses. Navigating that and maintaining a healthy relationship was a learning curve because you can get triggered. But he’s been with me through it all.”
They live in Philadelphia, where “I spend most of my days working from home with my dog and my cat,” she told The Guardian. “Sometimes I forget that all of this happened.”
Her dad lives in Puerto Rico, but “he calls me and we’ll chat for an hour,” Delimar said, while her brothers are her “best friends.”
And she and mom Luz spend holidays together and will talk multiple times a week. “We have the same laugh, the same mannerisms,” Delimar said in the series. “We have a beautiful relationship.”
