Mom whose newborn abducted 48 years ago still has hope of finding him
‘I'm still looking for that little baby that I held in my arms. I believe he's coming home,’ Donna Green said
An Atlanta mother has spent 48 years searching for her son, who was abducted from their home just five days after his birth.
Donna Green is still looking for her child, Raymond Green, who disappeared in November 1978 and has not been seen since.
She will host her annual event, A Night of Courage: Resilience of Hope, Saturday at Atlanta's Saint Paul A.M.E. Church to raise awareness of her son's case and other unsolved missing person cases.
Green has hosted similar events around her son's birthday since 2023 when the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children partnered with GSTV to publicize his disappearance.
"I'm still looking for that little baby that I held in my arms. I believe he's coming home," Green said at a 2023 press conference announcing the campaign.
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Timeline of Raymond’s disappearance
Green gave birth to her second child and first son, Raymond, on November 1, 1978, at Atlanta's Grady Memorial Hospital.
While looking at her newborn through the nursery window, she struck up a conversation with a woman who identified herself as "Lisa Morris.” The woman told Green she was at the hospital visiting her sister and her sister's new baby, Green told NCMEC in 2018.
The two continued talking, and Morris began visiting Green in her hospital room over the next several days. When Green was discharged, the woman asked for a ride home, saying she lived just a few blocks away.
Five days after Raymond was born, Morris showed up at Green's home.
“I thought it was a little strange. But when I asked what she was doing, she said she just wanted to come see how myself and the baby were doing,” Green said.
Morris stayed for about two hours while Green's brother was also at the house. When Green decided to take a shower, Morris offered to wait until she finished. Green asked her brother to keep an eye on Raymond while she was upstairs.
“I came downstairs, and she wasn't on the sofa, and I woke up my brother,” Green said. “I was like, ‘Where's the baby? Where's the baby?’ and he said ‘Oh, well the baby started crying.’”
Green's brother told her that Morris had picked up Raymond and walked out the front door with him.
The woman was last seen getting into a brown vehicle. Neither she nor Raymond has been seen since.
The search continues
Because Raymond was only five days old when he disappeared, his family had no photo of him or the woman suspected of taking him. Instead, investigators relied on Green's recollections to create sketches of both.
The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children created an age-progressed image based on a sketch from his mother's memory and photos of his siblings and other relatives, showing what he might look like today.
The organization also shared a sketch of the woman suspected of abducting Raymond. She is described as about 5-foot-6 with a medium build and may have a mole on her left cheek.
Despite nearly five decades without answers, Green has refused to give up hope. She has submitted her DNA to popular ancestry websites in hopes of finding a match that could lead her to Raymond, the NCMEC said in 2024.
The organization's 2023 campaign with GSTV featured Raymond's case on television screens at gas station pumps across the country in hopes of generating new leads.
“We believe that Raymond could be out there and may not know his real identity,” Angeline Hartmann, director of communications at NCMEC, said at the time. “We've worked with families in similar situations where their babies were kidnapped and then found alive as adults.”
Anyone with information about Raymond's disappearance is asked to contact the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children at 1-800-843-5678 or the Atlanta Police Department at 404-658-6666.