A man who says he was unloved and his family joked he was the “mailman’s kid” has now found out he was switched a birth with another baby. Kevin McMahon, 64, from New York, is now suing Jamaica Hospital in Queens, over the mix up on May 26, 1960.
By chance another baby called Ross McMahon was born just minutes apart and due to a mistake at the hospital each went home with the others parents. Kevin went home with Ross’ parents to Queens and Ross went with Kevin’s parents to Long Island and Kevin says that he only found out through Ancestry.com.
He claims he had a suspicion that he wasn’t his parents’ biological son and his fears were confirmed via a DNA test. “My siblings joked that, ‘You were the mailman’s kid. He doesn’t look anything like us.’ My younger siblings were fair-skinned, straight haired, blue eyed with freckles,” Kevin McMahon reportedly said.
He claims that he was badly treated by other members of his family as he looked different to them including abuse from his paternal grandmother who thought he was the result of an affair.
Similarly his dad also thought something untoward had happened but all four grandparents involved in the case have already died before they were unable to hear the truth.
“He believed he was raising somebody else’s child,” Kevin told CBS News about his father. “(Jamaica Hospital) made one calamitous mistake, and it just changed the entire course of my life.”
And Kevin is taking legal action against the hospital as he believes his life would have been so much happier with his biological parents who had more similar interests to him. He told how his real father had been a carpenter and his mother had liked birds, which are passions he also shares.
“I feel I could have shared so much with my parents, with my birth parents, but I didn’t get to do that. It would have changed the whole course of my life,” he continued. “The hospital, when they are in this business, they are playing God. They should be held to a completely different standard.”
He learned the devastating truth in 2020 when his non-biological sister, Carol Vignola, 66, did a DNA test through Ancestry and found she had a biological brother, according to the lawsuit filed in Queens Civil Court in November 2021. “It was like the missing piece in the jigsaw puzzle. [It] explained everything about why my childhood was the way that it was”, Kevin told the New York Post.
Ross McMahon was born 45 minutes apart from Kevin at the same hospital, court papers report. The infants were given consecutive birth certificate numbers both tagged “Baby McMahon”, but then they were allegedly handed to the wrong parents.
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