Phoenix Girl Missing Since 1994 Found Alive

PHOENIX, AZ — A Phoenix girl who has been missing since 1994 has been found in what has been described as a not-so-happily-ever-after story. The girl, who was born to a prostitute and passed from person to person as a baby until she eventually ended up in state custody, turned up at a Connecticut hospital in 2014, setting off a new effort to find her.

The girl had no identification and knew little about herself, according media reports. Suspicious about the story, a nurse at the hospital began looking at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children database and found an age-progression photo of Aleacia Stancil.

A DNA test three years later showed she was Toni Stancil’s daughter, according to police reports recently obtained by news station KPHO/KTVK.

Aleacia was 9 months old in December 1994 when Stancil said she needed a few days to “clear her head” and gave her baby to a friend, according to the television station’s report. The mother was later arrested and came home after a two-day stint in jail to find her child and the friend she gave her to were gone.

(Get Phoenix Patch's real-time news alerts and free morning news letters. Like us on Facebook. Also, download the free Patch iPhone app or free Patch Android app.)

But Stancil didn’t report Aleacia missing until 1995, and she was murdered later that year, leaving police with few clues about the girl’s whereabouts. The case went cold.

Phoenix Police Sgt. Armando Carbajal told KTAR news radio that cold-case detectives reopened the case in 2008 with the NCMEC and contacted family members to develop a DNA profile. Age-progression photos were distributed in a media campaign to find her, but the case went cold again until 2016.

That year, a young woman contacted Phoenix police and told them she had recently learned she had been adopted as a young child and said, “Hey, there’s a possibility that I may be Aleacia Stancil,” Carbajal told KTAR.

The DNA tests confirmed it.

“This was obviously an outstanding example of how Phoenix Police detectives and National Center for Missing and Exploited Children work together, and that no case is ever put on the shelf,” Carbajal said. “It’s continuously worked and all leads are aggressively sought after until they can be resolved.”

Aleacia, who was adopted and goes by a different name, wants to remain out of the spotlight.

“She doesn’t want it to interfere with her life, but she has indicated that she’s happy that she was able to find out who she was,” Carbajal told KTAR.

Her grandmother, Frances Ford, who now lives in Georgia, recently met her long-lost granddaughter and hopes to develop a relationship with her.

“I would want the world to know that these are the things that can happen to kids, and not every story is a happily-ever-after,” Ford told KPHO/KTVK, adding that “doesn’t mean that they came from someone who didn’t want them or didn’t care.”

Photo via Shutterstock