Story highlights
- Jaycee Dugard's mother, Terry Probyn, says her family is "still grieving"
- She chokes back tears as she describes this week's events in Cleveland
- "Another miracle happened yesterday," she says at an awards ceremony
Jaycee Dugard's mother choked back tears as she described this week's news that three long-missing women were found in Cleveland.
The dramatic story hit close to home.
"Another miracle happened yesterday. Three girls are alive," Terry Probyn said, speaking at a National Center for Missing & Exploited Children awards gala in Washington.
Nearly four years ago, Probyn lived through a similar struggle when she reunited with her daughter, Dugard, who was freed in 2009 after 18 years of captivity behind the home of a California couple.
Photos: Missing children who were found
Photos: Missing children who were found
Amanda Berry – Amanda Berry vanished a few blocks from her Cleveland home on April 21, 2003. She was 16. On Monday, May 6, she was found with two other missing women blocks from where she disappeared. Click through to see more miraculous stories of lost children who were found months or even years later.
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Photos: Missing children who were found
Georgina DeJesus – Georgina "Gina" DeJesus was found on May 6 with Amanda Berry and Michelle Knight in Cleveland. DeJesus was last seen in the Ohio city on April 2, 2004, on her way home from school. She was 14 when she went missing.
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Photos: Missing children who were found
Michelle Knight – Michelle Knight was the third of the three women who escaped from a captor's house in Cleveland on May 6. She was last seen on August 22, 2002, when she was 21.
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Photos: Missing children who were found
Elizabeth Smart – On June 5, 2002, when Elizabeth Smart was 14, she was abducted from her bed, raped and held captive for nine months by Brian David Mitchell. On May 25, 2011, Mitchell was sentenced to life in prison.
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Photos: Missing children who were found
Natascha Kampusch – Natascha Kampusch, an Austrian woman, was held prisoner in a basement for eight years from the time she was 10. Her abductor, Wolfgang Priklopil, beat her up to 200 times a week, manacled her to him as they slept and forced her to walk around half-naked as a domestic slave after kidnapping her in 1998. Kampusch escaped in August 2006. Priklopil committed suicide shortly thereafter.
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Photos: Missing children who were found
Jaycee Dugard – Eleven-year-old Jaycee Lee Dugard was abducted in 1991 from outside her home in South Lake Tahoe, California. She was held by Phillip and Nancy Garrido in a hidden compound of sheds along with the two daughters to whom she subsequently gave birth. Dugard and her daughters were found in 2009.
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Photos: Missing children who were found
Shawn Damian Hornbeck – Shawn Damian Hornbeck spent more than four years with Michael Devlin, passing as his captor's son in the St. Louis suburb of Kirkwood, Missouri. Shawn was 15 when he was found in 2007 and reunited with his family.
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Photos: Missing children who were found
Elisabeth Fritzl – Elisabeth Fritzl was imprisoned and raped by her father, Josef Fritzl, for 24 years. Fritzl lured his daughter into the basement in 1984 when she was 18 years old. She had seven of his children. She was released at age 42 after her ill 19-year-old daughter was taken to the hospital and police called the family in for abuse suspicions. In 2009 Josef Fritzl was sentenced to life in prison.
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Photos: Missing children who were found
Carlina White – Carlina White was abducted in 1987 from a Harlem hospital room. She learned her real identity 23 years later after finding her case online. She contacted the police after finding a baby picture that looked like her baby pictures on a missing children website. She was reconnected with her birth mother in 2011. White said she'd never felt like she belonged to the family who raised her.
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Photos: Missing children who were found
Steve Carter – Steve Carter also discovered he was a missing person after an online search. He had been adopted at age 4 from an orphanage in Honolulu. At 35 years old, he heard about White's case and clicked on Missingkids.com and found an age progression photo of himself as an infant. It came to light that biological father, Mark Barnes, reported him missing more than three decades ago after his mother, Charlotte Moriarty, took him for a walk and didn't return.
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Elizabeth Smart's advice: Time does heal 01:40
"I have to tell you, we're still grieving the loss of those 18 years," Probyn said Tuesday. "That's a long time to lose. But the good news is that we are together. And our family has formed a foundation as an avenue to pay forward the love and the care that we continue to receive."
Because of the work of the JAYC Foundation, which aims to help families recovering from abduction and the aftermath of other traumatic events, Dugard and her mother received "Hope Awards" from the center at Tuesday night's dinner.
The event was scheduled long before Amanda Berry, Gina DeJesus and Michelle Knight were found alive in Cleveland.
But the timing made Tuesday's award ceremony even more special, Dugard told the crowd.
"What an amazing time to be talking about hope," she said, "with everything that's happening."
