'That's not my dress!' NJ family desperately searches for mother's missing wedding gown
TEANECK, New Jersey -- A bride-to-be from New Jersey is searching near and far after realizing her mother's wedding dress wasn't in the box she'd kept safe for decades.
Christina Pereira remembers the day she found her perfect wedding dress.
"I just looked in the mirror and I knew that it was my dress. So, I put it on and I just felt like a princess," Christina said.
Christina and her husband Luis tied the knot 30 years ago at Our Lady of Fatima Church in Elizabeth, New Jersey.
She had her dress cleaned, boxed, and preserved just in case one day she would have a daughter who wanted it -- and she did.
"My mother was like, 'Okay, it's time, let's open up this box, you've been waiting.' Well, she's been waiting for over 30 years for this," her daughter Samantha said.
Samantha is engaged and planning to wed next year in her mom's dress.
"We pulled it out of the closet, we popped open the seal, and we took it out and I lifted it and it looked off to me. It didn't look like my dress," Christina said.
"She helped me put on the dress and she was looking at me and I was expecting her to cry and she didn't. And I was like, 'Do I not look good in this?' And then she realized, 'That's not my dress," Samantha said.
East Side Dry Cleaners in Newark -- which prepped Christina's dress for storage -- is out of business.
Desperate to find the right dress and return this one to its owner, Samantha turned to social media.
The video has been viewed hundreds of thousands of times, and they've even got some close calls from women checking their wedding dress boxes.
None were Christina's and no one has claimed this one, but they are optimistic.
"I walked down the aisle in this dress. I was blessed by our priest in this dress. It's sentimental for me," Christina said.
If you think you're the missing link in the dress mix-up, they would love to hear from you.
