Amanda Smith was reunited with her mother, Michele Hundley Smith, on Thursday after decades-long search
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.
