It all came to an end in a dark intersection in the middle of Jamaica, when two alert city police officers from the Queens South Taskforce spotted Leila Rajanarie and her 8-month-old daughter Navita Jagdeo, in the back of a livery cab.
They were not far from where the girl's biological father happens to live, and where friends say she'd become increasingly obsessed with getting the baby back.
"I just tried to tell her wait, be patient, you'll get back your kid. Don't do anything crazy," a friend said.
But Wednesday afternoon, police say she did.
They launched a massive search after she allegedly abducted her own daughter from Queens Hospital Center.
She'd recently lost custody of the baby, but Wednesday was allowed to accompany the girl and her foster mother to a doctor's visit.
But when the foster parent and a social worker turned their back, the desperate mother scooped up the baby, and escaped.
Two different dogs followed their scents several blocks, but lost the trail.
As police stood guard outside Rajanarie's Ozone Park home, a man who owns the corner liquor store, said the news was not a surprise.
He said that for weeks, Rajanarie had spoken of little else but finding her daughter and begged for cab fare to get to the hospital.
In the past few days, he says she even pushed an empty baby stroller, up and down the block.
"I guess maybe she was premeditated to just do what she does over there," he said.
"I hope everything is OK with her and the baby, both of them are safe you know. It's shocking to me to hear that she did something like that," a friend said.
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