Brooke and Adrian Gilley, eleven and twelve, suddenly went missing from their home in Missouri on March 15, 2022. The pair of siblings had not been seen by anyone, including law enforcement, for the last eleven months. However, they were recently discovered in Florida shopping with their biological mother while wearing disguises to hide their identity. Authorities suspected that the children were abducted by their biological mother, Kristi Nicole Gilley, 36, who did not have custody of the children, but now this lead has been confirmed.
Gilley was not authorized to have custody of the two children at the time they went missing last March. Thankfully, authorities were able to track down Gilley through a routine vehicle tag check. They located her vehicle 1,100 miles away from the children’s Missouri home at a Winn-Dixie store in Florida. After some investigation into the matter, the High Springs Police department learned that Gilley was a fugitive from the law and arrested her at a grocery store about twenty miles outside of Gainesville, Florida.
Authorities caught Gilley shopping in the grocery store with the two abducted children. All three of them were wearing disguises to hide their identity. Authorities managed to arrest the mother and identify the children as Brooke and Adrian Gilley, who went missing about eleven months before their discovery in Florida.
Thankfully, the two Missouri children are no longer with their kidnapper of a mother. Instead, they are thrown into the system with the Florida Department of Children and Families Services, where they will be taken care of until they can be reunited with their proper family members who have guardianship over the abducted children.
The two children will be reunited with their birth family, according to Florida officials. Prior to the authorities realizing that Gilley had taken them across the country to Florida, authorities thought the children were living in hiding in California – on the other side of the country.
Gilley remains in custody with the Alachua County Sheriff’s Office. She is expected to be extradited to Clay County, Missouri, to stand trial for abducting her biological children when she was not supposed to have custody of them.
Liberty Police Department in Missouri said: “Both Gilley kids have been safely located out of state. Their non-custodial mother is in custody on parental kidnapping charges out of Clay County, Missouri. Thank you to everyone who shared this post, as it helped bring these children home!!!”
Daily Mail readers shared their thoughts on the story in the comments. One United States reader wrote, “Heartbreaking that a mother has to do this to be with her kids. It’s obvious she loves them and would do anything to be with them. Would the other parent? Sometimes men will take the kids to hurt the mother when they don’t really want them. And it comes down to who can pay for the best attorney. I went down the same road and ran away. Found a good pro bono lawyer who believed in me.”