Twenty people gathered in Delaware for the remarkable family reunion.
Family and friends reunited with a loved one they had not seen since 1975.
Mika Cheesman was only 4 years old when her mother left her at a candy store inside New York’s massive Penn Station. Cheesman would only say one word, “Mommy,” but authorities couldn't find her parents. She was named “Missy” by officials because no one knew her real name.
Cheesman was eventually placed in an orphanage and adopted. But she never gave up trying to track down her birth family.
In 2001, she appeared on the daytime talk show "Iyanla” and discussed how hard it has been to find her family. It was while appearing on that show that she met Lynn-Marie Carty, a private investigator who specializes in reuniting families.
"There was so little information to start with to have a jumping off point, it was extremely difficult,” Carty told Inside Edition. "It broke my heart. I said I am going to solve this case before I leave this Earth."
Finally, after 17 years of dead ends, a DNA test helped track down a first cousin.
"She said everyone in the family thought Mika was deceased, they thought she died in 1975,” Carty said. “They were told she fell out of the window of high-rise building in New York."
Cheesman is now in her mid-40s and a mother of four children. Inside Edition was with her in Delaware as she met the family she hadn’t seen in four decades.
"I feel so much love, I feel so much enthusiasm by meeting my niece for the first time in a long time,” her uncle Samuel Wright told Inside Edition.
It was a bittersweet moment as she hugged and kissed her mother, who she has now learned has severe mental health issues, which Cheesman said explains why she was left at Penn Station over 40 years ago.
There were tears of joy as Cheesman reunited with the family she never got to know.
Cheesman, who found her her real name is actually Lynette Wright-Smith, said she's not angry with her birth family but just happy and ready to move forward and be in each other's lives.
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