cbsnews.com
Steve Carter as a baby with his biological mother, in 1977.
A Philadelphia man is now unraveling the details of his childhood
abduction, more than a year after finding his own face on a missing
persons website.
Steve Carter,
35, knew he had been adopted from a Hawaiian orphanage as a child, but
never knew anything about his biological family. He had always been
puzzled about a couple things, like his birth certificate, which wasn’t
created until almost a year after his birth, and listed him as a
half-native Hawaiian, he told CBS News.
“I don’t really have many of the features of a native Hawaiian,” says Carter, who’s blond and blue-eyed.
He became even more curious about his past after hearing the story of
Carlina White,
the Atlanta woman who made headlines when she found her baby picture
online, then learned she had been kidnapped from a Harlem hospital as an
infant in 1987.
Carter’s hunch was confirmed when he found a picture of himself last year on MissingKids.com, CBS News reports.
But the photo wasn’t of Carter — it was an age-progression image of
what Max Panama Barnes, who was listed as a 5-month-old missing baby,
would look like at 26 years old.
“My first thought was, ‘Oh my God, that’s me,’ ” he told CBS News.
Carter and
Barnes had the same birthplaces, and their birth dates were one day apart.
He called the Honolulu police department and set up a DNA test.
“I let them know my info and they ran with it,” he told CNN. “They were the ones who did all the legwork.”
Nearly a year later, Carter had the truth: He was born Max Panama Barnes.
“That’s when it really started to sink in that I’ve got a family,” he told CBS News. “I’ve got another family.”
Carter learned that his biological mother ran away with him in 1977.
She changed his name, birth date and even the race of his father —
explaining why his birth certificate listed him as a half-native
Hawaiian.
Carter thinks his mother put him in the orphanage from which he was
adopted, and that she wound up in a psychiatric hospital, according to
CBS News.
By the time Carter’s biological father reported him missing, he had a new identity and police didn’t make the connection.
Now, Carter has reunited with his biological father, Max Barnes, who lives in northern California.
“He introduced himself over the phone,” Barnes told CBS News. “And I
was absolutely, positively, thunderstruck and amazed. And we just sort
of, in an hour of conversation, tried to catch up on 32 years.”
Barnes explained that Carter’s mother would often take spontaneous
trips with him, but she always returned. He added that he never stopped
searching for his son.
“Not one day went by when I wasn’t — he wasn’t in my thoughts,” Barnes told CBS News.
Carter, who still has several relatives to meet, says he’s still trying
to figure out who his mother is, and what happened in the three weeks
between his disappearance and his arrival at the orphanage, CNN reports.
rmurray@nydailynews.com
