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A North Carolina woman whose mother was missing without a word for 24 years before authorities managed to locate her – alive and well – has reunited with her and says she forgives her.
“I know everything is not black and white – there’s a whole gray area,” Amanda Smith said of her mother, 62-year-old Michele Hundley Smith, after they embraced in front of a courthouse on Thursday. “And so I mean, look – life’s too short for me to hold a grudge against her because she’s my mom.”
The Smiths’ reunion served as a postscript of sorts to a story that commanded days of national media attention beginning on 20 February, when the sheriff’s office of Rockingham county, North Carolina, announced that it had tracked down Michele after she had been reported missing in December 2001.
Michele’s husband at the time reported that she mentioned going shopping the last time he saw her – only neither she nor her minivan ever came back. Rockingham deputies over the years described working with multiple state and federal law enforcement agencies in North Carolina and Virginia in search of Michele, whose disappearance they considered “troubling” – but to no avail.
Then, on 19 February, the Rockingham sheriff’s office said it received a tip about Michele’s whereabouts. Investigators immediately followed up, made contact with Michele in another community of North Carolina, and announced that they had found her healthy and safe. Rockingham’s sheriff, Sam Page, said Michele had told him unspecified “domestic issues” drove her to disappear, and she also reportedly didn’t want her location disclosed.
Rockingham prosecutors subsequently ruled out filing criminal charges against Michele over her prolonged disappearance. But within days of her being found, Rockingham authorities booked her on a warrant issued for her arrest after she failed to appear in court in an alleged DWI case dating back to November 2001.
Amanda, who was 14 when her mother left and maintained a social media page dedicated to searching for her, showed up on Thursday to a hearing for Michelle in that unresolved case.
They hugged outside the Rockingham courthouse in view of a news camera for local station WXII. Amanda subsequently addressed the moment on camera, saying her other family members had chosen to “make individual decisions about the relationship they want to have with” her mother.
Speaking for herself, Amanda remarked: “We only get one life – and I want my mom in it.”
The local news outlet WGHP reported that Amanda was asked explicitly if she forgave Michele for leaving.
“Yes, yes, I do,” Amanda was quoted as replying. “We all go through things. I understand. Life happens and we all go through things.”
