NEW YORK — A man on Long Island grew up with a suspicion his entire life that something wasn’t right… that maybe he wasn’t in the right family. Then, his sister took a DNA test, and those suspicions turned to truth… he had been mistakenly switched at birth.
“My siblings joked that, you know, you were the mailman’s kid or stuff like that,” Kevin McMahon said. “It was just an observation, like he doesn’t look anything like us.”
McMahon’s younger siblings were fair, had straight hard hair, blue eyes and freckles. McMahon had none of those traits.
“If this this happened today, my parents would have went home from the hospital and said, ‘this child is completely unlike us,’ they would start to question it immediately,” he said.
It was May 1960, at Jamaica Hospital, when Kevin McMahon was issued a birth certificate ending in 2710.
Ross McMahon was born within hours, with his birth certificate ending in 2711.
The infants were switched at birth. McMahon is now suing Jamaica Hospital.
“They’re completely responsible,” McMahon said. “They made one calamitous mistake, and it just changed the entire course of my life.”
Jamaica Hospital declined to comment.
“They’re two Caucasian mothers with the same last name, in their 30s, that both gave birth to baby boys at the same hospital on the same day within two hours of each other,” said attorney Jeremy Schiowitz.
McMahon, pictured to the left in the photo below, found out when his sister Carol received her Ancestry.com results, which revealed an unknown biological brother.
The brother standing next to Carol is Ross, the other baby McMahon switched at birth.
Ross is really Kevin, and Kevin is really Ross.
“She was so fearful, so anxious about telling me,” said Kevin McMahon about when his sister told him. “When she told me, I couldn’t process information, I’m like, I feel nothing. Like, I honestly, I have no feelings here. I think I was in sort of a state of shock at that point.”
Cece Moore is a genetic genealogist at Parabon Nanolabs, and has been featured on “Finding Your Roots” on PBS, and on the ABC series “Genetic Detective.”
She says she’s seen dozens of cases like these in the U.S.
“It’s so incredibly sad that we’re seeing so many surprises like this through direct-to-consumer DNA testing,” she said.
For Kevin McMahon, it answers the long-held question of why it always felt like he was treated differently than his siblings.
“You know, even with that knowledge, it feels like it’s too late for me,” he said. “It doesn’t change anything. It doesn’t change my insecurities.”
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