Adopted brother and sister, Frank and Vicky, were raised in Staten Island by their adoptive parents and grew up with another brother, their parents’ biological son. Now ages 20 and 19, the two recently got the surprise of their lives when they learned through a DNA test that they are actually biological brother and sister.
Their adoptive parents, Angela and Dennis Laffin, had a biological son, Nicholas, when they began to deal with infertility and tragically lost two babies during pregnancy. They decided to grow their family through adoption, and adopted Frank, who had been found in a diaper bag outside of Bellamy’s Christian Daycare in Staten Island in 2002. Though they had decided after adopting Frank that they weren’t going to seek out another adoption, just over a year later in 2004, Angela heard about an abandoned baby girl.
Vicky was found wrapped in a blanket under a toilet tank at Richmond University Medical Center, also in Staten Island, by a cardiology technician named Claudia. Angela called her caseworker to ask about the baby girl.
“My caseworker was like, ‘Why? Are you interested?’ I said, ‘It’s a girl, right?’ She said, ‘Yes.’ And I didn’t need a second to think about it. I said, ‘I want her.’ I didn’t even call my husband!” Vicky was then also adopted by Angela and Dennis.
It was recently that Vicky and Claudia, whom Vicky knew growing up as her mom’s close friend, revisited that bathroom, which is now an electrical closet. Vicky had known she was adopted, but hadn’t heard the story of how she was found.
With Frank and Vicky both knowing they were abandoned as babies on Staten Island, they wanted to know more.
Angela told them, “Maybe you have some relatives in common. You’re both from Staten Island.” But no one could imagine what would be revealed by the Ancestry.com tests they took.
“I got the match that my brother had popped up as my full sibling, my biological brother,” said Vicky. She called her family.
“She’s screaming her head off,” Angela told TODAY.com. “I couldn’t understand a word she was saying. I was like, ‘Were you in a car accident? Are you OK?’ And she goes, ‘Me and Frank are brother and sister!'”
Angela replied, “‘Of course you’re brother and sister. I raised you.’ And Vicky says, ‘No, Mom. You don’t understand, we’re biological siblings.'”
Frank explained a similar phone called he received from Vicky, “I was driving home, actually, and she called me and she was telling me, like, ‘Oh my god, we’re biologically related,’ and I was like, “Yeah, OK, whatever.’ Little did I know I’ve been living with my blood my whole life. It’s insane.”
He added, “We were both found a year and a half apart and wound up with the same family. The odds are insane.”
Their father Dennis added, “For years, people would ask us, ‘are they related?’ And we’d say no because we didn’t know they were.”
Angela questioned how she could have missed it. “Because I wasn’t supposed to miss it,” she said. “They’re my children.”
Frank said he had always dreamed of having a child of his own blood, saying he just wanted to know what they would look like. “I never thought it would look like Vicky!” he laughed.
After learning that Vicky was his biological sister, Frank sent his mother Angela a text reading, “I love you and daddy … that day I was left [was] the best day of my life because it led me to you two.”
