Like any new mother, Kathryn Jones thought the baby she was given at Duncan Doctors and Surgeons Hospital on May 18, 1964, was the prettiest baby she had ever seen. “I loved her from the moment they put her in my arms,” she said in a recent interview, pausing before adding: “It never occurred to me that she wasn’t. mine”.
But according to a lawsuit filed in Stephens County Court in Oklahoma, the infant Jones carried and brought home was not her biological daughter at all. Citing multiple home DNA tests, Jones alleges that staff at the now-defunct hospital mistakenly handed over her child more than 50 years ago, leaving her to raise a child that wasn’t hers. .
Now, she and her daughter are struggling to pick up each piece.
“It was like someone ripped a piece of my heart out,” Jones said of a day in 2019 when she learned of the alleged union. “I just can’t deal with it.”
Tina Ennis, the child Jones raised and loved as her own, describes her childhood – now somewhat ironically – as “normal”. Those she knew were that her mother and father broke up when she was 2 years old, and Jones remarried a few years later, to a man Ennis still called “Dad”. He is a house painter, her mother is a telephone operator. She has an older sister, Brenda, with whom she remains extremely close, and a younger brother eight years younger. She’s always been a bit taller and thinner than the rest of her family, but her mother says she looks just like her biological father. “I never felt like I didn’t belong,” Ennis said.
Then, in the summer of 2019, Ennis and her 23-year-old daughter took a home DNA test from Ancestry.com. Jones’ father, like her father, left when she was very young, and Ennis wanted to keep an eye on her grandfather. But when the results came back, they were just names she didn’t know. She called her mother to ask if she knew anyone named Brister, because they dominated her family tree. She didn’t.
Finally, Ennis convinced Jones to take a DNA test. When the results were sent back — to an email address that Ennis operated on behalf of Jones — they were even more confusing. Neither Ennis nor her daughter appear in Jones’ genealogy. Ennis thought it might be because she had stopped paying the Ancestry.com monthly fee, but when her daughter called the helpline, the woman who answered told her that’s not how it works. “You know, you find out some interesting things on Ancestry,” the woman told her.
Ennis’ daughter believes she somehow had a switch at birth, but Ennis isn’t sure. Through an internet search, her daughter tracked down a local woman who was born on the same day as Ennis and looked a lot like Jones. She convinced Ennis to send the woman a Facebook message, even though Ennis did say, “if I want to [that message]I would think that person is crazy. ”
The woman on the other end of the message, Jill Lopez, didn’t think Ennis was crazy – although her husband did suspect she might be a scammer. Lopez was raised by Joyce and John Brister in a rural suburb of Duncan, a stay-at-home mother and a father who worked in the oil business. She had older sisters and a few close friends nearby, and her grandmother lived less than a mile away. But Lopez resented her country life, always feeling so far away from where things were going. She eventually moved to the small city of Lawton, where she was living when she received a message from Ennis.
Tina Ennis, Kathryn Jones and Jill Lopez.
Courtesy Ennis & Lopez family
Lopez also agreed to take a DNA test, and the results came back faster than either of them expected. She called Ennis the day they arrived to tell her the news, but she didn’t have to. Ennis saw an alert coming from her mother’s email account, telling her she had a new family connection — Lopez. It was then that Ennis realized that she had hoped none of this was true. “My heart just sank [in that moment,]”She recalls,” because I was like, “This is real.”
Ennis didn’t want to tell Jones what she’d discovered until she was absolutely certain, but after meeting Lopez at a local restaurant and talking for a few hours, she knew there was no denying it. She arranged a meeting with her mother and two siblings to announce the news.
At first, Jones admitted, she resisted the information, telling Ennis over and over that she had to be her daughter. But when they showed her a photo of Lopez, she said, the first thing she thought was, “Where was I when the picture was taken?” and “I don’t remember those clothes.”
“Because she really looks like me,” Jones added. “And it devastated me.”
Tina Ennis and Jill Lopez as children.
Illustration by Thomas Levinson / The Daily Beast / Courtesy Ennis & Lopez family
It is difficult to say how many babies are delivered at birth in the US. The National Institutes of Health does not track and the hospitals, understandably, do not make the information public. ONE Baltimore Sun An article from 1998 claims 28,000 babies get confused every year, but the research it cites is not linked and the article itself is promoting a new line of infant tracking devices.
The general consensus is that most mixed cases are detected before families are discharged. Hospitals have a range of safeguards in place, such as wearing a baby’s identification band right after it’s born, to ensure any mistakes are quickly corrected. How a switch with Ennis and Lopez could happen is unclear; The suit was made light on details, and the doctors who delivered both babies were long dead.
But the result, all three women agreed, was truly earth-shattering. Jones is overwhelmed with guilt for all the birthdays, Christmases, graduations, and weddings she’s missed for her biological daughter, but also dreads losing Ennis. Realizing that Ennis’ children are not her own grandchildren, she said, “was one of the low points of the whole thing.”
“I feel like I’m losing my daughter and grandchildren,” she said.
Ennis, meanwhile, had to deal with another pain on her own. Her apparent biological parents – the Bristers – had died years ago, before she had a chance to meet them. Lopez’s family sent pictures of her and told her stories, but it wasn’t the same. Sometimes, when I think about it, it’s hard not to feel jealous. “Jill got to live with my biological parents, and now she gets to live with my parents that I grew up with,” she said. “I didn’t know what to think about it at first, but the more I think about it, the more I get really sad.”
That’s the point of this whole story: There’s no big, Disney-like, happy family moment at the end. Nearly three years later, all three women are still struggling with how to feel, and how to have each other in life. Both women were married and had families of their own: Ennis had three children; Lopez two. Ennis is a career postal service provider, Lopez recently transitioned from teaching to selling real estate.
Ennis says she’s only seen her sibling once or twice; she can’t tell if she’s holding them at arm’s length or vice versa. She and Lopez get along very well, but they don’t see each other very often – they’re both too busy and it’s all a bit difficult. Sometimes, when Jones spends time with Lopez, she doesn’t tell Ennis and her sister. She doesn’t want them to be jealous.
Three women are suing Duncan Regional Hospital — the hospital their attorneys say took over responsibility for Duncan Doctors and Surgeons Hospital after it merged with other local hospitals in 1975 — on charges of recklessly and negligently causing mental distress. The hospital has denied these allegations, insisting it is not the same entity where the two are said to have converted. (A judge rejected the hospital’s offer of dismissal for these reasons last month.). Contacted by phone, the hospital’s attorney declined to comment further.
Meanwhile, the women are still figuring out what their new family will be like. Ennis and Lopez both brought their children to Jones’ home for Christmas this year; they said the nieces swam together. It took their mother a while to get comfortable with it all.
“I just had to try to stabilize my emotions for a while,” explains Lopez, “because there’s so much more to turn your mind around,” explains Lopez.
“From the outside, maybe we’re all pretty,” Ennis added. “But in my opinion, that’s not what I want in anyone.”
