Couple hopes girl is their missing child

Nearly six years after baby Sabrina Aisenberg vanished from her crib in Florida, the FBI is analyzing the DNA of a child halfway across the country who shares the same heart-shaped lips and dark eyes.

Her name is Paloma, and virtually nothing about her parents or beginnings is known.

For Sabrina's parents, who now live in Bethesda, Md., it is the most hopeful turn in a case almost unmatched for its tortuous drama. Marlene and Steven Aisenberg kept their infant's plight before the nation with months of tearful appeals and prayer vigils, only to find themselves charged with conspiring and lying to investigators about her kidnapping. The government later was slammed for a botched, distorted investigation, and in January, a federal judge awarded the couple $2.8 million toward legal fees.

None of it brought Sabrina home, though. Then in March, Steven Aisenberg picked up the phone to hear a Michigan woman say she might have seen his daughter. She directed him to a Web site of missing children, to a photo of a girl in Illinois labeled "Paloma Unknown."

It could be, Aisenberg thought, and not just in the lips and eyes. There was a decided resemblance.

"We pray to God this could be her," his wife said Friday, one day after a cheek swab was taken from the girl by authorities in Pontiac, Ill. The FBI will match it against DNA samples that the state of Florida held from Sabrina as a newborn and from her parents and two siblings. Officials say the results could take about two weeks.

"We just want to know if it's Sabrina," Marlene continued, "and if it is, we want her home."

In their many unknowns, the parallels between the two girls' lives are striking. Sabrina was 5 months old when she disappeared from her family's home in November 1997, sometime between midnight and 7 a.m.

With no sign of forced entry, no witnesses, no ransom note, police never had much to go on. Trash bins and storm sewers were searched, a psychic consulted. Nothing was found.

The following spring, in the hot border city of McAllen, Texas, a toddler mysteriously changed hands. The story that later would be reconstructed by Pontiac police was that an unidentified woman -- assumed to be the child's mother -- had given her to an older woman named Molly Garza. When Garza learned she was about to be deported to Spain, she left the little girl with a nurse at a migrant clinic. On a piece of paper, she signed her name and permission for the child's adoption.

The nurse turned to her sister and brother-in-law in Pontiac, who had been trying to start a family. "Right or wrong, she brought the child to Pontiac," Police Chief Don Schlosser recounted Friday, and the couple commenced adoption. But with no birth certificate or biological parent, their effort stalled immediately. A court appointed them the girl's guardians, but everything else "has been in limbo since."

Schlosser said the circumstances of Paloma's arrival in his town, located in eastern Illinois, never indicated any criminal intent or activity. But to make sure, police posted her photo when she was about 2 years old on the Web site of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. And heard nothing.

"This is the first bite we've had on it," Schlosser said. "Everyone is doing their best to ID this child and get (her) with her rightful parents."

And if not the Aisenbergs, then who? Investigator Kevin Kalwary, who works with the family's Tampa attorney, is hopeful but cautious.

"It's amazing to me that this baby passed through four sets of hands and went through five to six states," he said. "If it's not Sabrina, it's someone's missing baby."

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