Michigan man claims to be missing boy 25 years after disappearance
After a suggestion by the man, police offered to let the mother meet her alleged son, but she was uncomfortable with the idea. And he didn't know things that only she and her son would know.
By ZACHARY KEYSERAge progression of D'Wan Christian Sims(photo credit: NATIONAL CENTER FOR MISSING & EXPLOITED CHILDREN)
Exactly 25 years to the day after four-year-old D'Wan Sims went missing from the Wonderland Mall in Livonia, Michigan, a man asserting to be the missing boy has come forward and submitted his DNA to police, in an attempt to further prove his claim that he was in fact that boy.The case, which caused a minor media frenzy in the Livonia area at the time, surrounded the disappearance of Sims in 1994 - who is still presumably to be dead, until proven otherwise.As of last week, however, following the unnamed man's assertion, the facts of the quarter-century-old story are up for interpretation once again.However, Dwanna Wiggins, the missing boy's mother whose last name was Harris at the time, has serious doubts that the man who walked into the Livonia Police Department on December 11 is her son."She did contact and talk to this person and ask him about some personal information that only she and D'Wan Sims would know, like birthmarks," Police Captain Ronald Taig stated. "He wasn't able to answer those questions, along with the date of birth."After a suggestion by the man, police offered to let Wiggins meet her alleged son in a police station, but she refused, claiming she was uncomfortable with the idea.“I have no clue, whatsoever,” Wiggins told the media in front of her home on Friday. “You would like to be hopeful.”What makes the story more curious, though, is that when the disappearance was initially reported to police on December 11, 1994, Sims' mother stated that her son mysteriously vanished from the Wonderland Mall while he was accompanying her on a routine shopping trip – but, the surveillance videos gathered surrounding the day in question only showed Wiggins present in the mall, with no signs or images of the missing boy throughout the footage.Taig claimed that officials investigating the disappearance in 1994 could not find anything concrete to connect Sims to actually being present at the mall that day.“I was here at the department, and we looked at all of the video – we checked everything – and we never saw D’Wan [Sims] with Ms. [Wiggins],” Taig explained to Detroit's NBC WDIV-TV.After this discovery in 1994, Wiggins claims that she was on the short end of "constant ridicule" after being named a suspect in the case of her missing son.In maintaining her innocence, Wiggins asserts that another case inadvertently swayed public opinion regarding her case, and never gave her a fighting chance in the eyes of the media or the public to locate her missing son. That case was the one regarding Susan Smith, a mother who initially claimed that her children had been kidnapped in a carjacking incident; it was revealed nine days later, however, that she had drowned them after Smith admitted to the crime.“With every other thing that has happened... it’s been negative about me,” Wiggins said.The man, who prefers to remain nameless throughout the investigation, first shared his initial beliefs on social media surrounding his uncertainty with his own origin story that his parents told him as a child – which raised some red flags for police investigators.“I guess what’s odd is that he claimed that he didn’t want any of this information out in the media – and from what I understand, he has put this out on social media,” said Taig.The man has provided his DNA to the Livonia Police Department, which still has the original samples garnered from Sims, his father and his mother. Officials with compare the man's DNA sample with theirs to determine if a match can be confirmed.Official results from the test are expected in three to four months. If the story is found to be untrue, the man could be facing charges of aggravated identity theft as well as lying to police officials.
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