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For The Washington Post

Virginia Oliver

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Angela Laffin

When Vicky Laffin sent in her DNA test, she was pretty sure there wouldn’t be any surprises.

“I was not really expecting anything huge,” said Vicky, 19, who was adopted shortly after she was born in 2004 by Dennis and Angela Laffin, a couple in Upstate New York.

She thought perhaps she’d discover some interesting details about her biological background.

“I had known that I’m African American, but I had not known any specifics,” she said.

Vicky and her brother, Frank — who was separately adopted as a baby by the same couple about two years before she was — decided to do the tests together, out of curiosity about their own ethnicities. Both she and Frank were abandoned as newborns.

Family photo

Their parents supported their desire to learn more about their backgrounds and bought them each an AncestryDNA test kit. Frank mailed his in first, and received his results a few days before Vicky did, in late July.

While Frank, 20, was surprised to learn he had some Italian and English heritage, aside from that, his results were mostly what he had expected.

Vicky’s results, however, revealed something shocking: Her Ancestry profile matched her with Frank, and according to their results, the siblings share between 49 and 56 percent of their DNA. <a href="https://www.silive.com/news/2023/08/teen-abandoned-at-birth-and-adopted-by-loving-family-returns-to-rumc-but-there-is-so-much-more-to-this-story.html" target="_blank">The adoptive brother-and-sister are, in fact, full biological siblings</a>.

“That was definitely a big shock,” said Vicky, who got the results on July 29. “I wasn’t at all expecting my brother, who I had lived with for my entire life, to be my biological brother.”

Frank thought his sister was playing a prank on him when she called him screaming with the news.

“I actually thought she was messing with me,” Frank said.

The siblings’ parents, who knew nothing about their children’s birth parents, were blown away. When Vicky told her mother, “I said, ‘What?! No, that can’t be,’” Angela recalled. “I still can’t even process it.”

She was a felon who was addicted to drugs. Then she became a lawyer.

Frank first came into the Laffins’ lives in 2002, shortly after he was <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/04/nyregion/metro-briefing-new-york-staten-island-baby-found-on-day-care-doorstep.html" target="_blank">found in a diaper bag on the doorstep of a day-care center</a> on Staten Island.

Angela and Dennis already had a son, Nick, born in 1995, and after struggling with fertility for several years, they decided to adopt. They did extensive research, and looked into adopting from abroad to grow their family, but they agreed, “there are so many children here in America, we should stay local,” Angela said.

Once they completed the training, medical clearance, home study and background checks required to become adoptive parents, they registered with a local adoption agency. Then, they waited for a call. It came on Sept. 10, 2002 — a few days after Angela’s birthday — and Frank was dropped off at their home that same day. Angela calls Frank her birthday gift.

“He was a little bag of bones,” said Angela. “He was so tiny.”

The family put three baby names in a hat, and allowed Nick to pick one. Then Frank was part of the family.

“I took care of him,” Angela said. “He was my baby.”

Prison guard lost job for taking in inmate’s baby: ‘It was the right thing to do’

Two years later, in 2004, news broke that <a href="https://nypost.com/2004/02/25/3rd-baby-abandoned-in-s-i-shocker/" target=_blank>three newborns were separately abandoned in New York on the same day.</a> At the time, the Laffins had their hands full with their two sons and had already decided they would not adopt another child.

But when Angela heard that one of the three babies was found in a hospital bathroom on Staten Island, she suddenly reconsidered their decision. She called her adoption agency to ask for more information. As soon as the caseworker confirmed the baby was a girl, “just like that, I said ‘I want that baby.’”

Her husband was on board. He went out to a baby store and bought “everything that was pink,” Angela said.

Both Frank and Vicky described their childhoods as loving, supportive and fun. While Nick learned about his siblings’ harrowing beginnings when he was a teenager, Angela and Dennis decided not to share the details with Frank and Vicky just yet, thinking they could process it better when they were older.

“They were too small to understand what that meant,” Angela said. She told her children that “when you’re ready, I have a box put away, and we can sit down.”

“I’ve always loved them and protected them,” said Nick, 28. “For them to find out any sooner than they were ready, it would have hurt them, and I never wanted that.”

For the most part, Frank and Vicky rarely asked questions about their birth stories, their mother said.

“Growing up, I knew I looked different from my brother and my parents, but I never felt different, so I never felt the need to question it,” said Frank.

“We were both very content with where we got in life and who we ended up with,” Vicky said. “We have a very stable, loving household.”

A few months ago, though, Frank was flipping through one of his father’s file folders, looking for a document, when he found a newspaper clipping from the day he was born. He quickly connected the dots.

He told his mother what he had discovered.

“I dropped my face into my hands, and I started to cry,” Angela said. “He was not supposed to find out like that. I was waiting to do that gently.”

Frank reassured his mother that he was glad he learned about his past, and grateful to have grown up “in the care of two great people who made me who I am today,” he said.

Once Frank knew about his birth story, Vicky wanted to know about hers, too, so her parents told her.

“I was very shocked that our stories were so similar,” she said.

In late June, both Frank and Vicky hoped to thank the people who found them as newborns. Frank visited Lillie and Sheila Bellamy — the two women, a mother and daughter, who found him on the doorstep of the day-care center where he was abandoned.

Courtesy of Angela Laffin

Meanwhile, <a href="https://www.silive.com/news/2023/08/teen-abandoned-at-birth-and-adopted-by-loving-family-returns-to-rumc-but-there-is-so-much-more-to-this-story.html" target="_blank">Vicky visited the Richmond University Medical Center </a>on Staten Island, where Claudia Beadle — a cardiac technician — found her in a bathroom 19 years ago. The hospital was formerly St. Vincent’s Medical Center, which closed in 2006.

“I will never forget that moment,” said Beadle, who has worked at the hospital for about 40 years. “I opened the stall, and there she was, laying on the floor in the bathroom under the toilet tank.”

Firefighters helped deliver a baby 18 years ago. Now he’s their intern.

Beadle brought Vicky to the pediatric clinic and visited her regularly until she moved in with the Laffins a few days after she was found. All Vicky’s life, she knew Beadle as a family friend, but didn’t know until recently that she was the person who found her. They shared a private moment together in the room where she was found, which is now an electrical closet.

“It was emotional for her and me,” Beadle said.

The Laffin family is in the process of setting up a scholarship fund to help cover college tuition for abandoned children. They are also aiming to raise more awareness about <a href="https://shbb.org/" target=_blank>Safe Haven Baby Boxes</a> — which are <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/national/how-a-baby-box-works/2016/05/05/1a937c24-12a3-11e6-a9b5-bf703a5a7191_video.html" target=_blank>drop-off locations </a>to keep abandoned newborns safe.

“We are lucky, but not every kid out there — adopted or not — is as lucky as we are,” said Frank, who is a restaurant manager, and is looking into college programs. When it’s time for him to start a family, he said, he wants to adopt, just as his parents did.

“There’s only a small number of kids that get lucky with a nice home and a family that takes care of them,” said Vicky, who is studying psychology and creative writing in college.

While the news that they are biologically related was bewildering in the beginning, the siblings said their relationship remains as it always has been.

“Nothing has really changed between us,” said Frank, “aside from the newfound knowledge that we have the same blood, which, in our family, never really mattered in the first place.”

“He will always be my brother, along with my other brother,” said Vicky. “They’re my siblings no matter what, and my Mom and Dad are my Mom and Dad no matter what.”

That’s how Angela and her husband hoped their children would feel.

“Straight from the beginning, we loved them. We wanted them,” Angela said. “It didn’t matter where they came from, they were my children from day one.”

McGill University, BA

Columbia University, MS in journalism 

Sydney Page is a staff reporter who writes for The Washington Post’s Inspired Life section, a collection of stories about humanity. She has been a contributor to The Post since 2018.

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