Siblings abandoned as babies meet for the first time
HESPERIA, Calif. -- Three babies abandoned by the same mother in the 1980s have finally reunited, CBS Los Angeles reported.
Janet Barnicoat's photo album has grown since her last Mother's Day.
"It's been a really crazy roller coaster," she told the station.
But the pictures captured moments even she couldn't fathom.
Barnicoat was able to meet her brother Dean Hundorf in 2014, and CBS Los Angeles was there for the reunion.
Hundorf and Barnicoat found each other through a genealogy website. DNA tests confirmed their relationship.
"I was more interested in my ethnic makeup. This was something I would never dreamed of," Hundorf told CBS Los Angeles in 2014.
Nor did he dream he would soon find another DNA match -- a sister named Julie. They had all been abandoned at birth in Lawndale.
"There was a connection," Barnicoat said. "It's like we'd never been apart from each other."
But the three still had questions: Who was the mother who had left Julie at a mini market, Dean on a doorstep and Janet in a paper bag in an alley?
Old news reports showed the woman who found her. That woman's name is Joanna Hauser. The reports also show Hauser visiting the newborn at the hospital in 1981.
But the video of them reuniting would soon take on new meaning. Barnicoat would later learn that Hauser was actually her mother.
"We asked her if she loved us," Barnicoat recalls, "and she said, 'Oh God, I thought about you every day. I loved you every day.'"
Hauser could not be reached for comment, but Barnicoat learned she had not been tossed away in an alley. She also found her biological father.
"I wanna say it was like a sigh of relief," Barnicoat says, "I had gone 15-20 years with that story in my head constantly, that I was tossed away, that I was thrown into a dumpster."
Barnicoat says she's forgiven Hauser who was already a single mother and struggling. She says others shouldn't judge her either.
"She did us a favor," Barnicoat says, "All three of us had amazing families."