In 2020, when Harris herself was tirelessly searching for her daughter who was missing for 32 days, she heard Aniah’s voice say to her, “Mom, please don’t let this happen to anybody else.”
Angela responded out loud and said, “Baby, I won’t.”
Harris was put in touch with one of Russell’s closest friends on the phone who was “crying and so hysterical,” recalls Harris, and told her, “miss Angela, we need you.”
“That was a situation where we had to jump into action,” says Harris, “so I went to the Hoover Met [Complex], I called my team and they were on their way. The parents were already speaking to someone in the news, and then they said they got a tip and they were going to Georgia.”
Harris recalls Russell’s mother,
Talitha, asking her for help.
“She said, ‘Will you please run this and take care of everything here?’ I said, ‘Absolutely’ and that’s how it started,” she says. “The parents were exactly the way I expected them to be. They were just like me. They were in continuous, constant go mode.”
All along, “I was still under the impression, or telling myself, that Carlee’s in danger,” says Harris. “We’ve got to get to her. She may just already be gone, and she’s not going to come home.”
“All of a sudden somebody says that she’s [Russell] at the Red Roof Inn. [Her friend] was like, ‘Do you think it’s true?’ And I was like, ‘I don’t know. I don’t know, but we need to find out.’
It wasn’t even five minutes later when Harris got a call back and was told, ‘Miss Angela, Miss Angela, somebody said she’s home,’” Harris says.
Harris called Talitha who was in a panic, she recalls, and confirmed
Russell was in fact back home.
“I said, ‘Is she okay?’ and she said, ‘I don’t know. She seems to be okay. She just seems like she’s in shock. We’re going to take her to the hospital.'”
“I can’t even tell you the emotion I felt knowing that she was home and safe,” she says. “It was overwhelming.”
“I just went in and hugged Carlee and I told her that I’m so happy that she’s alive and I’m so happy she’s okay,” says Harris, who let Russell rest during the brief visit. “She hugged me back and she was like, ‘Thank you for everything you’ve done.’”
When Harris saw the press conference the following day, “I’ve really just been basically speechless to be honest,” she says. “I’m just trying to be classy and neutral because something is telling me in my spirit that that’s the way I need to be. Of course deep down inside I’m very angry. I do not regret anything at all.”
“If I could control everything, there would never be another missing person. But unfortunately, that’s just not the way our world is right now. But I think it does desensitize people, and it just makes them not want to rush to get involved as quickly or at all,” she says.
Adds Harris: “I’m moving forward with Aniah’s Heart;
Aniah’s Heart continuing to educate people on safety and teach self defense classes. If someone else is missing and they need our help, we will be supportive and we will search if we have to. This is really what me, my family, and everyone at Aniah’s Heart is concentrating on right now. There’s still so much more work that has to be done. I don’t want people to hesitate. I want them to take every case seriously.”
Carlee Russell Search Leader, Whose Daughter Was Abducted and Killed, Doesn't Regret Helping, But Is 'Shocked'
*So, five minutes after the friend finds out about the RRI tip, Carlee walks in the door? Did I read that right?