Pensacola, fl
Two men revealed that they were replaced at birth in a hospital in West Virginia, USA about 80 years ago, and they were sent home with their parents, a mistake that was only recently discovered thanks to a DNA test, according to the British newspaper Daily Mail.
John William Carr III and Jackie Lee Spencer are now suing the Parish of Welling Charleston, due to negligence by the hospital where they were born.
Carr and Spencer were born on August 29, 1942 at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Canon. The Dominion Post initially reported that their joint case, filed at the Monongalia District Court, says that employees of the parish-run hospital sent them home with the two wrong families.
The case arose last year when DNA tests revealed that Carre and Spencer had no genetic identities with the two families they lived with, but that they matched with each other’s families, as the two men assert in their complaint.
In the lawsuit, the two men say they and their families have suffered “lifelong consequences” as a result of the switch, and are looking for unspecified compensation.
The spokesperson, Tim Bishop, said that the diocese does not comment on the pending claims.
In a phone conversation with the “Daily Mail” on Tuesday, Attorney General Charles Crookes said that Spencer had spent decades searching for the man included in his birth certificate as his biological father, Shirley Spencer. He was told that the man abandoned his mother before he was born.
When Spencer was 11, his mother handed him an old photo of the man she believed to be his biological father and shared some details of his autobiography.
After the man’s relatives were found on a website, Spencer performed a DNA test to see if it was linked to him and found that it was not. The additional DNA test also showed that he was unrelated to any of the people with whom he grew up and believed to be members of his family.
It turned out that the tests showed that he was really associated with the Carr family, and after much scrutiny he knew that Carr was born on the same day at St. Joseph’s Hospital.
Spencer and his wife, Phyllis, called Baccar, who agreed to take a DNA test that, showed he was connected to people whom Spencer believed were his relatives.
Crocs say in the lawsuit that Spencer, who is now in his late seventies, did not meet many of his family members.
According to the lawsuit, many of the people Spencer should have known throughout his life were gone, and she continued, “He feels as though most of his family members have died at once. He is saddened by the loss of the life he was supposed to lead while balancing the feeling of love and gratitude he feels for the family he has known throughout his life.
Karr, who has blue eyes like most of the Spencer family, said he looked different from the family he grew up with, and he always felt he was not in the right place.
“Well, I never felt fit here because my mother and father had brown hair and brown eyes, as did my brother and sister,” he explained in the lawsuit.
His lawyer explained that Carre’s father “often commented that John did not look like his son, and he was not very kind about it.
