Two North Dakota families say their lives were forever changed after learning two baby boys were switched at birth nearly 40 years ago.
They are now suing the hospital where the mistake happened, saying the mix-up changed the course of both families forever.
The discovery happened by chance when Kyle Bylin received an at-home DNA test during a Christmas gift exchange.
After uploading his results to a genealogy website, he matched with a woman who turned out to be his biological aunt.
That unexpected connection eventually led to Jeremy Morrison taking his own DNA test, which confirmed the two men had been raised by each other’s families.
The results left both men stunned. Morrison became convinced something was wrong after seeing a photo of Bylin’s brother, who looked strikingly similar to him.
According to the recent lawsuit, Morrison and Bylin were the only babies born at Unity Medical Center in Grafton on January 26, 1988. The lawsuit claims the newborns were somehow sent home with the wrong parents.
The hospital said it found no evidence that its staff caused the switch. However, Bylin, whose birth name was actually Jeremy Morrison, still has the incorrect ID bracelet given to him by the hospital.
It has been two years since the DNA tests revealed the truth, forcing both families to rethink nearly 38 years of memories, relationships and missed experiences.
Evelyn Newton, the woman who raised Bylin, says she will always see him as her son.
At the same time, she feels she lost the chance to experience important milestones with her biological child and believes those lost years can never be replaced.
While Unity Medical accepts that the babies were switched at some point, it says it cannot determine exactly how it happened.
The hospital explained that records from that time no longer exist because so many years have passed, and none of the employees involved in the births still work there.
For Morrison, learning the truth has not changed the way he feels about the parents who raised him. He says they are still his parents, and despite some difficult moments growing up, including his parents’ divorce when he was young, he remembers having a happy childhood filled with sports, school and love.
Today, Morrison lives in Colorado and works as a welding inspector for a wind energy company.
He sometimes wonders how different life might have been if the switch had never happened; he believes he may have stayed in North Dakota to work on the family grain farm alongside his biological father and brother.
Newton said she never questioned whether Kyle was biologically hers while raising him.
While his dark hair stood out as the rest of the family had lighter hair, there were relatives on her husband’s side with similar features.
Since Newton was adopted herself, she also had little knowledge of her own biological family traits.
For Bylin, the discovery answered questions he had carried for years.
After building an academic career far from North Dakota, he often felt out of place during family conversations and wondered why he seemed so different from the people around him. He now believes those differences make much more sense knowing he was raised by a family he was not biologically related to.
Both Bylin and Morrison have since met their biological parents.
While Bylin and Morrison have not yet met in person, they have spoken by phone, and both families are trying to build relationships while accepting that the situation is complicated for everyone involved.
