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A man is suing Jamaica Hospital Medical Center in Queens, New York claiming he was switched at birth and only just now discovered it 64 years later. He says he only learned about being switched after taking an over-the-counter DNA test.
64-year-old Kevin McMahon from Long Island is the third of four children in his family, but he says he always felt like he was different. His siblings all had straight hair, blue eyes, and freckles. He didn’t possess any of those traits.
“My siblings joked that, you know, you were the mailman’s kid or stuff like that,” McMahon told ABC 7 News. “It was just an observation, like he doesn’t look anything like us.”
As it turns out, there was a good reason for that. When his sister, Carol Vignola, learned about the DNA test results she went in search of birth records at Jamaica Hospital. It was then that she discovered another baby boy named Ross McMahon was born on the same day as Kevin. And according to Carol’s DNA results, Ross McMahon was a direct relative of hers, but not the man she has known as her brother Kevin.
“She was so fearful, so anxious about telling me,” Kevin McMahon said, recalling his sister when she was giving him the news. “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.”
“Two Caucasian mothers with the same last name, both giving birth to baby boys on the same day. They were switched before the birth certificates were even signed,” Jeremy Schiowitz, Kevin McMahon’s attorney told NBC 4 News.
“There’s no mystery as to what happened,” Schiowitz added. “Jamaica Hospital switched the babies. The DNA proves it. The mystery is, how did they let this happen?”
Now, Kevin McMahon is getting to know his blood family as is Ross McMahon, but sadly, all four of the parents are now deceased. Jamaica Hospital declined to comment on the case.
“I feel I could have shared so much with my birth parents, and I didn’t get to do that,” Kevin McMahon said. “It certainly would have changed the whole course of my life.”