Mom of Missing North Carolina Girl Appears to Flee U.S.

Police in North Carolina suspect that the mother of Madalina Cojocari, an 11-year-old girl who went missing in 2022, might have fled the country. Madalina was last seen getting off her school bus in Cornelius, North Carolina, on Nov. 21, 2022. The parents of Madalina, who was in the sixth-grade, did not report her disappearance until Dec. 15. Diana Cojocari, the 12-year-old’s mother, a Moldovan woman in the U.S. on a green card, spent almost two years in prison for a failure to report her daughter’s disappearance sooner. Madalina’s step-father, Christopher Palmiter, and Diana Cojocari’s then-husband was sentenced to 30 months in prison for the same charge. Earlier this week, the Cornelius Police Department announced that Diana Cojocari was considered as a suspect in her daughter’s disappearance. Diana Cojocari was likely to be deported back to her home country, but police in North Carolina believe the mother fled on a plane to Eastern Europe after she posted on Facebook that she was headed from JFK Airport on a plane to Frankfurt and then Bucharest. Officials believe that from the Romanian capital she might head back to Moldova, a country that has close ties with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Diana Cojocari and her family have accused Palmiter of selling Madalina for cash. However, in the trial of Diana Cojocari, jurors were told that the mother had “faith-based rituals that sometimes involved knives and fire. Jurors were also told Cojocari was paranoid and believed Russian operatives—such as Russian President Vladimir Putin—were endangering the family,” according to a WBTV report at the time. Palmiter and Diana Cojocari have blamed each other for the girl’s disappearance. But an article by Newsweek found that Palmiter claimed Diana Cojocari “sent her daughter to live with relatives in Moldova to protect her because she believed Russians were after her.”

Read more at The Daily Beast.