Ten years ago, 22-year-old Carlesha Freeland-Gaither was abducted in Germantown and taken to Maryland, where she was eventually rescued thanks to camera footage and her own courage. Her harrowing experience has inspired a new TV movie.
"Abducted Off the Street: The Carlesha Gaither Story" premieres at 8 p.m. Saturday on Lifetime. The film highlights Freeland-Gaither's determination to survive and her mother's relentlessness to find her and bring her home.
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The movie features Riele Downs as Freeland-Gaither and Kenya Moore as her mother. Moore, a star of Bravo's "The Real Housewives of Atlanta" and who has a young daughter, told Page Six that playing the role was eye-opening.
"It was scary because it's one of your worst fears. So you don't want to have to come to the realization that this could possibly happen one day," Moore said. "So it was scary for me to say yes, but I think that when I looked at the greater good in the fact that there is so much in this film that could save lives in terms of teaching you how to be situationally aware of things, teaching you how to leave a trail if you're ever captured, how to stay alive, how to get back home."
The movie will be available to stream through Lifetime Movie Club and Hulu on Sunday.
The real-life abduction took place on the evening of Nov. 2, 2014, when Freeland-Gaither, a nursing aide, was returning home after visiting her godson. She stepped off a bus and was walking along West Coulter Street when a man, later identified as Delvin Barnes, grabbed her and threw her into a gray Ford Taurus.
Freeland-Gaither purposely dropped her cell phone on the ground during the kidnapping to alert authorities that she had been abducted. She also used a hammer to hit her abductor in the head and to smash the windows of his car.
The abduction was caught by surveillance camera and witnessed by a man named Dwayne Fletcher, who tried to intervene but backed off after noticing Barnes was carrying a 12-inch knife. Fletcher recovered Freeland-Gaither's phone and called the police.
The video of the abduction made headlines. Freeland-Gaither's mother, Keisha Gaither, made emotional public pleas for her daughter's safe return. And it wasn't long before her prayers were answered.
The search expanded from Philly to Maryland after authorities found that Freeland-Gaither’s ATM card had been used by a man there. According to reports, Freeland-Gaither gave Barnes her debit card and pin, in hopes that it would help lead authorities to her location. A tip from a Maryland woman who found a bag of trash in her driveway containing an ACME receipt from Northeast Philly, a bag of chips and shattered glass, also aided authorities.
Investigators tracked Barnes' vehicle through a GPS device, and on Nov. 5, they located Barnes and Freeland-Gaither inside the Taurus in the parking lot of a shopping center in Jessup, Maryland. Barnes was arrested, and later sentenced to 35 years in prison.
Freeland-Gaither suffered injuries. After a visit to a Maryland hospital, she returned home to Philly – just days after the kidnapping.
Along with the surveillance footage and help from good samaritans like Fletcher, authorities credited Freeland-Gaither's safe return to her self-preservation tactics.
"She's an intelligent girl," Philadelphia Detective James Sloan said of Freeland-Gaither after she was found.
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