After Zella Jackson Price reunited with her daughter Diane, more women share similar stories that claim they were lied to about their dead babies by Doctors at a St. Louis Hospital

More than 20 St. Louis women are now coming forward to share a frightening story of what may have been human trafficking at Homer G. Phillips Hospital. Attorney Albert Watkins said the women reached out to him after 76 year old Zella Jackson Price discovered that the daughter she gave birth to (Baby Diane known as Melanie Diane Gilmore) in 1965 was alive and well despite being told that her child had died.

Watkins filed a petition Monday in St Louis Circuit Court, seeking access to court files and adoption records at a closed Homer G. Phillips Hospital, which at one point was the only hospital that accepted African-American patients in St. Louis. Watkins says he hoped the petition will help him uncover any information “that would explain the genesis of Baby Diane.”

Watkins, who spoke to Fox 2 News in St. Louis, says he believes the babies were indeed taken and sold to adoptive parents. He has asked Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon and St. Louis Mayor Francis Slay to launch investigations.

FBI spokeswoman Rebecca Wu said that the agency is aware of allegations, but refused to say whether the FBI has opened a human trafficking investigation.

Price and Gilmore were reunited after Gilmore’s daughter tracked down her grandmother via facebook. After a DNA test was done it was proven that Melanie Diane Gilmore was in fact the child of Price. Price says after giving birth to her daughter a nurse had told her the baby died but she always believed there was more to the story. Brenda Stewart recalls that the same thing happened to her after she gave birth at 16. Stewart says after the nurse told her her baby died, she went on to say that “she was only 16 and she didn’t need a baby.”

-Abesi Manyando(@abesipr)