Mother reunited with long lost daughter

The mother of a girl missing for 10 years and located in South Carolina this week said Friday she was experiencing mixed emotions about reuniting with her daughter.

“I’m just being very guarded and optimistic,” Helen Braun, 51, told The Associated Press by phone from the Philadelphia airport, where she awaited a plane. “She has no idea who I am.”

Her daughter, Rebekah Ann Braun, was 2 years old when she was taken from her Tempe, Ariz., home by her father, Danny Arthur Moran.

Rebekah was found Tuesday night at a mobile home in the rural town of Donalds. On Monday, Moran, 57, was arrested in Roanoke, Va. He faces charges of custodial interference and unlawful flight to avoid prosecution.

Moran’s girlfriend, 52-year-old Lillian Jean Pitts, was also arrested and charged with accessory to kidnapping after the fact.

Braun said she planned to bring toys she saved from when her only child was a toddler and pictures of the two together. Braun hasn’t seen her daughter since Feb. 24, 1996.

Although Braun always believed she’d see her daughter again, she wasn’t sure how her daughter, now 12, would feel when the two met at a South Carolina hotel Friday night. When Pitts was arrested Tuesday, Rebekah became emotional.

Pitts was being held at the Abbeville County Jail. Moran was being held at a Roanoke, Va., jail and a detention hearing was scheduled Monday.

In 1986, Moran was arrested for kidnapping his two sons from a previous marriage and served two years in an Arizona prison.