Today marks 20 years since Elizabeth Smart was found, 9 months after being kidnapped from her family's home in Salt Lake City.
SALT LAKE CITY — Twenty years ago this week, Utah and the entire nation breathed a sigh of relief when Elizabeth Smart was found in a Sandy neighborhood nine months after being abducted from her Salt Lake City home. Smart is now 35 years old, a wife, a mother of three, and a survivor.
Thomas still keeps a bin full of crucial items to the Smart search. As family spokesperson, a role he moved into because Elizabeth's cousin started an internship at his public relations firm just 2 weeks prior to the abduction, Thomas stepped up to help the grieving family in need, and soon became the face of media updates and a critical part of the family's strategy to find Elizabeth.
Several months into the empty search, it was Lois who was resigned to perhaps never seeing her daughter again. But Chris said it was Ed Smart who never lost hope and that his faith never diminished. During a trip to New York City where Chris and Ed were advocating for missing children awareness, a father's intuition took over.
"I was like, 'Oh, my gosh! Could he mean me? Could he actually mean me? It really wasn’t until that moment that I was able to be like, 'I am Elizabeth Smart!'" "I started calling him incessantly until he finally answered and said, 'Yes, we brought in an indigent teenager that we believe is Elizabeth Smart,' and I took a deep breath and was trying to withhold the tears saying, 'Where did you find the body?, and he said, 'What body? She's in the room next to me, she's alive!"
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