NORFOLK, Va. — A little girl discovered dead in an Alabama mobile home park more than 10 years ago will finally be laid to rest.
ABC affiliate WTVM reported in January, police arrested the father of Amore Wiggins this year, more than 10 years after investigators found the child’s skeletal remains.
At Amore’s funeral in Norfolk Saturday, it was an emotional day for the family.
“Amore - if I could do it all over again, I would hold you so tight. Never in a million years did I think you wouldn’t be loved right,” Amore’s mother Sherry Wiggins said.
WTVM reported that investigators in Opelika, Alabama, near Auburn, found a child’s skeletal remains at a mobile home community back in 2012. Officers determined the death was a homicide that likely happened sometime between 2010 and 2011.
In December 2022, a decade later, investigators identified the remains as Amore and arrested Amore’s father and stepmother a month later in January 2023. Her father faces felony murder charges while her stepmother faces charges of failure to report a missing child.
“To hear the horrors you faced nearly killed me. My Amore. My love. My special heartbeat,” Wiggins said at the funeral.
Wiggins noted this year, Amore would have been seventeen years old. She said although she’ll never get her daughter back, this funeral gives her a sense of closure.
“I’ve been happy, I’ve been sad, I’ve been frustrated. Most of all, now that I got to this point. Things are a little more easier,” she said. “She’s never going to be forgotten. Her name alone means something very powerful and it’s what everyone has continued to express.”
Amore’s burial will be held Sunday afternoon.