Daughter of Runaway Mom: “I Wish I Had Never Cried”

The ex-husband and daughter of Brenda Heist talk about this week's emotional rollercoaster after finding out she was alive after disappearing 11 years ago

The teenager whose mom resurfaced 11 years after she disappeared is not eager for a relationship with the woman she has only just now learned is alive.
 
Morgan Heist, who learned last week that her mother Brenda Heist had surfaced in the Florida Keys, said the news has made her recall with bitterness the years of mourning she endured when she assumed her mother was dead and feared she'd been murdered.
 
"I ached every birthday, every Christmas," said 19-year-old Morgan Heist, a freshman at a community college outside Philadelphia. "My heart just ached. I wasn't mad at her. I wanted her to be there because I thought something had happened to her. I wish I had never cried."

When Brenda Heist vanished, her husband Lee Heist — from whom she was in the process of getting divorced — was investigated but was cleared as a suspect.

He raised the children without her and got the courts to declare her legally dead. He remarried in 2009.

NBC 10 Philadelphia's Monique Braxton talked with Lee Heist, who says he felt "mixed emotions" after a detective told him that his ex-wife was still alive.

"Based on what I've seen and heard, I just wish that she'll get well, whatever the problems are and I hope she'll be able to go on with her life," said Heist, who does not wish to talk to his ex-wife.

"I'm not going to say anything. I think there's really nothing we have to say to each other," said Heist.

Brenda Heist's mother, Jean Copenhaver, said Thursday that her daughter "had a real traumatic time" but was doing OK.
 
Brenda Heist was released from police custody on Wednesday and is staying with a brother in northern Florida for now, Copenhaver said.
 
Copenhaver, of Brenham, Texas, said she had spoken with Heist several times since Friday, when the 54-year-old woman turned herself in to police in Florida and was identified as a missing person.
 
"She just said she thought the family wouldn't want to talk to her because of her leaving," Copenhaver said. "And we all assured her that wasn't the case and we all loved her and wanted to be with her."
 
Morgan Heist said she's not sympathetic, partly because her mother had a choice, unlike the family she secretly abandoned.
 
"It's definitely very selfish," Morgan Heist said. "She clearly did not think of me or my brother or my dad at all with that decision. She thought of herself."
 
Heist told police she made a spur-of-the-moment decision in 2002 to join a group of homeless hitchhikers on their way to Florida, walking out on Morgan, 8, and her brother, then 12.
 
Brenda and her husband, Lee, were living together but going through an amicable divorce when she learned she had been denied housing support, police said.

She was crying about that in a Lancaster park when three strangers befriended her and offered to let her join them.
 
Morgan Heist said her parents had agreed to live near each other once they divorced. Brenda Heist had been a bookkeeper at a car dealership.
 
"It's more of a mystery than ever," she said. "Her life was not hard at all."
 
Brenda Heist told police she slept under bridges and survived at times by scavenging food from restaurant trash and panhandling. But Lititz Police Detective John Schofield said Thursday he is looking into reports that have come in over the past day suggesting Brenda Heist's time in Florida included much less miserable periods.
 
"We're getting several calls from people down in Florida that knew her who want to say she's not being truthful with us," Schofield said.
 
Heist told a detective with the Monroe County Sheriff's Office that she had recently been arrested in the Tampa Bay region and might be in violation of probation. She told the detective she used the name Kelsie Lyanne Smith and provided a date of birth.
 
Jail and court records show Kelsie Lyanne Smith, with a matching birth date, was arrested in January on misdemeanor charges of marijuana possession, possession of drug paraphernalia and providing false identification to law enforcement.

After pleading guilty, Smith was sentenced to time served and was released on Feb. 13. She was also ordered to pay court costs but failed to do so and was found delinquent on April 15.
 
Copenhaver said she has not pressed her daughter about what led her to walk away from the life she knew in Pennsylvania and then live underground for more than a decade.
 
"We haven't gone into that with her," Copenhaver said. "She just needs time to recover, and have some peace and that. She'll tell us when she's ready."
 
She said Heist was born in South Carolina, then moved as her father was transferred by the Air Force to Italy and Missouri before ending up in San Antonio, where she graduated from high school.

Heist told police she contacted them after feeling like she was at the end of her rope and tired of running.

Copyright AP - Associated Press
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