Kidnapping victim speaks out on her ordeal

She was awakened from a sound sleep, dragged from her bed and before she knew it Wednesday morning, Mary Josey was in a Mitsubishi Montero headed to New Jersey with her aunt - a woman who was "ranting" and "incoherent" and pointing a handgun at her.

Josey, 23, who spoke about her nearly four-hour ordeal Thursday, would learn quickly that her aunt was being hunted as the killer of two people.

About an hour before the aunt, Kim Wolfe, allegedly abducted Josey, police say the 43-year-old county correction officer had shot an ex-girlfriend outside Nassau University Medical Center in East Meadow. Not long afterward, police say, she shot an uncle to death.

Josey's ordeal started about 2 a.m., when police say Wolfe snatched her from her Hempstead home. It ended with her aunt's surrender and arrest at 5:45 a.m.

Josey recalled that at the time of the abduction, she knew only that her great-uncle had just been shot and killed, and her great-grandfather also had been shot - both by Wolfe, according to police.

She said she didn't even hear an argument - the argument police said preceded the shootings. Nor did she know that earlier, Wolfe allegedly killed Stacie Williams, whom Josey described as "like a second aunt."

"She was ranting," Josey said of her aunt. "She said we were going to Jersey."

Josey, a part-time student who works at a mall, said Wolfe pointed the gun at her several times. Wolfe also talked to several people on her cell phone. One was her sister Felicia Wolfe, 38, who tried to persuade her to surrender. Police hostage negotiators also were on the phone, trying to persuade Wolfe to return to the family home in Hempstead.

The Montero got as far as Staten Island, Josey said. Then her aunt started back toward Long Island.

Felicia Wolfe credited negotiators with talking her sister, whose behavior she said she barely recognized, into turning back.

"The voice was the same," Felicia Wolfe said of their cell-phone conversation. "Mentally, I don't think she was my sister."

When she returned to Hempstead, Kim Wolfe was stopped on Harriet Avenue by Nassau County and Hempstead Village police, and Josey was freed, unharmed.

Felicia Wolfe and Josey were exhausted. Both said Thursday they still hadn't slept much since the ordeal.

"I thought I was going to be gone," said Josey of her fears during the ride. "You would never think somebody in your family would do something like this. My life will never be the same."

With Gary Dymski