Whether they admit it or not, I think every mom who has ever gone on a grocery run alone has thought, “But like, what if I kept driving?” Of course we don’t do it; we get those groceries and snuggle our babies even tighter when we get home. But the reality is, there are fathers and mothers who do just that, leaving a wake of chaos and heartbreak in the rearview mirror. In 2002, mom Brenda Heist was among them. What’s even more bizarre is 11 years later, she resurfaced at a Florida police station.
This is a before and after photo of Brenda Heist, who dropped her kids at school in 2002 and was reported missing later that day. She walked into a Florida police station in 2013 and said she was alive after eleven years.
byu/blue_leaves987 inHolyShitHistory
According to WKRG, Heist dropped off her two children at school, When the kids returned home, they realized that the house was empty. Dinner had been set out to defrost and the laundry was half done, but mom was no where to be found. The kids called their father, who was in the process of divorcing their mom, and he filed a missing person report.
Four days after that report was filed, her car was found in a parking lot in a neighboring county, right by a bus station. After years of no signs of life from Heist, the ex-husband had her legally declared dead in 2011.
Two years later, she was found alive. In fact, Heist actually turned herself in on outstanding warrants in Florida and told officers she was “tired of running.” The entire time, she was living a double life, where she lived with a man in a trailer and did odd jobs. For the last two years, she claimed that she was homeless.
However according to CNN at the time, Sondra Forrester, a Floridian friend of Heist’s, said she wasn’t homeless. In fact, she was living with her under an entirely new name, Lovey Smith.
“She told me that she had a bad relationship with her boyfriend and I started to kind of feel bad for her,” Forrester told Anderson Cooper at the time on his show Anderson Cooper 360. “She described it as sort of an abusive situation, saying that he was maybe an alcoholic and I just let her know that my door was always open for her. I felt bad for her.”
She explained that she never asked her friend much about her past, but Heist made it clear she did not have any children. She even claimed to be a widow.
“She said she had been married for, like, 20 years to a man named Lee and he had worked for the Marriott and they had traveled around and visited amazing places and he had died,” Forrester explained on Cooper’s show.
When she saw the photo of her friend on the news years later, she couldn’t believe her eyes.
“I was absolutely shocked when I saw that photo,” Forrester said, per CNN. “She has deteriorated significantly since the last time she was seen around here, which was, you know, the middle of 2012, the end of 2012. That’s not been very long, you know, seven months or so.”
Heist claims the fateful day she left, she was crying in the park when two strangers convinced her to go hitchhiking in Florida. As far as a family reunion, that seems out of the question for now. Her daughter, Morgan Heist, stated that she didn’t feel her mother “deserved” to see her.
In an appearance on the Piers Morgan Show, the young woman said she was seething mad that her mother never so much as even called. Her mother’s “disappearance” incriminated her father, who was a suspect for some time, and it went on to affect the kids even more. The family revealed other parents wouldn’t let their children befriend them, fearing the father was secretly a murder.
“I can’t believe she would do that because she was a good mom,” Morgan Heist shared. “She was great. But, I mean, I guess something happened. Something snapped in her.“
Brenda Heist is being charged for several crimes including theft and false ID in both Florida and Pennsylvania. Other Florida charges also include drug possession and drug paraphernalia.
