Little Girl Lost: The Delimar Vera Story

Some Stories have Lifetime movie written all over them.Including that of Luzaida Cuevas, who in 1997 was told that her infant daughter, Delimar, had died in a fire at their Philadelphia home.Cuevas, whose daughter's body was never found, refused to believe she had died, and her faith was rewarded: Somehow, while attending a birthday party several years later, she recognized a young girl there as Delimar, obtained a bit of her hair for a DNA sample and ultimately proved that the child was hers.

They were reunited in 2004, and the following year, the woman who'd been raising Delimar under another name in Willingboro, N.J., was sentenced to 14 years in prison after pleading guilty to kidnapping and other charges.That's the bare bones of the story that ran in the papers, including this one, at the time, and that's the story they're telling Sunday in Lifetime's "Little Girl Lost: The Delimar Vera Story," a straightforward recap of a tale that's maybe never felt quite as straightforward as it appears here.

Feelings aren't facts, though, and Lifetime seems to be sticking with those that make the prettiest picture."Scrubs'" Judy Reyes, who plays Cuevas, manages to make her character's unwavering faith - not to mention her immediate recognition of a child she hadn't seen since she was 10 days old - entirely believable.And so Valerie/Carolyn counts as yet another bad-girl character for Ortiz, for whom "Ugly Betty's" Hilda Suarez might have been expected to mark a departure, signaling casting directors to look beyond a string of slutty and/or unpleasant TV roles to the far greater range she's been allowed to show as Hilda.