“It was like somebody had ripped out a part of my heart.”
Like any new mother, Kathryn Jones thought the baby she was handed at Duncan Physicians and Surgeons Hospital on May 18, 1964, was the most beautiful child she had ever seen. “I loved her from that second that they laid her in my arms,” she said in a recent interview, pausing before adding: “Never once did I think she was not mine.”
Then, in the summer of 2019, Ennis and her now 26-year-old daughter took an at-home DNA test from Ancestry.com. Jones’ father, like her own, had left when she was very young, and Ennis wanted to track down her grandfather. But when the results came back, they were filled with names she didn’t know. She called her mother to ask her if she knew anyone named Brister, because they dominated her family tree. She did not.
The woman on the other end of the message, Jill Lopez, didn’t think Ennis was crazy—though her husband did suspect she could be some kind of scammer. Lopez was raised in a rural part of Oklahoma by Joyce and John Brister, a stay-at-home mother and a dad 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 too far away from where everything was happening.
The general consensus is that most mix-ups are discovered before families leave the hospital. Hospitals have a range of protective measures in place, such as putting an identification band on the baby as soon as it is born, to ensure any mistake is quickly rectified. How a switch with Ennis and Lopez could have happened is unclear; the suit is light on the details, and the doctors who delivered both babies are long since deceased.
The three women are suing Duncan Regional Hospital—the hospital their lawyers claim took over liability for Duncan Physicians and Surgeons Hospital after it merged with other local hospitals in 1975—alleging recklessness and negligent infliction of emotional distress. The hospital has denied these allegations, claiming it is not the same entity where the two were allegedly switched. . Reached by phone, a lawyer for the hospital declined to comment further.