Police searching for woman they say tried to claim lost child that wasn’t hers at Stone Mountain

Channel 2′s Tom Jones was at Stone Mountain Park, where Kelly Pittman found a 3-year-old boy who had been separated from his family on Saturday night.

Pittman said the child was separated from his family as people scrambled to take cover during a rain storm.

She asked the boy if he needed help, and he told her he did.

Pittman asked the boy for his mother’s name and then yelled out the name to try to locate her.

“This woman, she was on the phone, and she lifts her arm up and says, ‘Here! He’s mine,’” Pittman said.

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Pittman said she was initially relieved to find the child’s mother. But then, something didn’t seem right.

“She was doing it again. She’s like, ‘Over here!’ And my hair stood up on the back of my neck,” Pittman said.

The woman was Middle Eastern. The child wasn’t.

Pittman said she also thought the fact that the woman didn’t frantically rush over to retrieve her son was odd.

So Pittman decided to go to a park ranger instead. Soon, the child’s real mother showed up.

“Immediately, we knew it was the mom, because she just bawled,” Pittman said. “I mean her face... She fell, and her knees were weak.”

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Park police are now trying to locate the woman who said the child was hers. John Bankhead with the Stone Mountain Park police said they are going through surveillance video in hopes of finding her.

“We want to talk to her and see what her motives were,” Bankhead said.

Pittman is just happy that she was in the right place at the right time and that the child got back to his family safely.

“I look back and think, ‘What if I had given him to that woman?’ And it just makes me sick,” Pittman said. “I think God was with me, and He was giving me the right instincts in the moment.”