Jorge’s mind was churning. Perhaps his father had had a child with a woman other than his mother—after all, he’d heard rumors that his largely absent biological father, Norman Enrique, was already married when he met Jorge’s mother. But in the end Jorge decided that Laura had merely had a chance encounter with someone who looked a lot like him, so the topic faded from their conversation, except that she sometimes teased him about his strange doppelgänger.
If Jorge had taken the story more seriously, the twins might have met sooner. Two years before, a security guard who worked in Jorge’s office building bought some meat from William at his butcher shop. William recalled, “He asked me if I had a brother named Jorge, and I told him, ‘No, sir,’ and that was all.” Jorge continued, “The next day the guard said something like, ‘Hey, Jorge, I saw a guy exactly like you! I swear I think he is your brother.’ Well, we just laughed, changed the subject, and forgot about it.”
There was another close call. A woman who cleaned the common areas in Jorge and Carlos’s apartment building had babysat for William and Wilber in La Paz. The two young men she occasionally walked past probably looked quite different from the two small children she had known, but had she stopped by the meat counter, she would have noticed the resemblance of at least two of them. A casual conversation about who they were and where they were from might have led to the truth.
A month after Laura and Jorge spoke briefly about her encounter in the butcher shop, and in an odd course of events, Yaneth took a job at Strycon, the company where Laura and Jorge worked part time. Yaneth soon ran into Jorge, a chance meeting that reminded her of his stunning physical resemblance to William. At the same time she knew that he was not William. Yaneth had socialized with William on many occasions, such as birthdays, holidays, and family get-togethers. But now that she had a chance to see Jorge, she gave more thought to the confusion at the meat counter: “Oh, my God, they look exactly alike—even the way that they walk is the same!” The two never spoke, but each time Yaneth saw Jorge at work, she was surprised, awed, and perplexed. Teasingly, she told her boyfriend that she sometimes saw “William’s twin brother” at work.
At first Yaneth didn’t question why the two looked so much alike and didn’t act on it; sometimes she wondered whether she had even gotten a really good look at “the double.” Perhaps she was mistaken about their similarity because unrelated look-alikes can appear more alike when they are apart and the comparison isn’t one on one. The same is true of identical twins because any differences in body height, body weight, or facial markings may go unnoticed when they are apart unless the differences are extreme. Regardless, Yaneth thought the whole situation seemed surreal, which explains why it became an occasional inside joke between her and Laura. Just as Laura teased Jorge about having a physical duplicate, Yaneth teased William, telling him that she worked at Strycon with his “identical twin.”
* * *
Several other events occurred at this time, and in hindsight they were significant. Yaneth downloaded pictures of Jorge from the Internet to share with William’s godparents, Ana Liria Hernandez Velasco and her husband, Luis Hernando Mateus Orduña. Yaneth didn’t do this for fun, but to find out whether people who knew William well would think it was he when they actually were looking at a picture of Jorge. If others couldn’t tell the two apart, Yaneth and Laura would know they were not the only ones to see the striking resemblance. The Velascos had known William his entire life, so they were excellent candidates for this test—in fact, Ana Liria had helped her aunt, William’s mother, Ana Delina, care for her twins when they were babies. When he was older, William often visited his godparents in Bogotá and had even lived with them for a while; as a result Ana Liria considered him her son. Both she and her husband were certain that the young man in the photo was William. William also saw those pictures, as did some other people he knew, and everyone was surprised, then amused, at seeing his look-alike. Sharing a beer with the guy in the photo seemed like a cool idea to him at the time.
Like Jorge, William had apparently forgotten about the security guard who had come to the store to buy meat and told him about “this guy” who looked just like him.
Digging Deeper
For the next six months no one said or did much about the Jorge-William confusion. Everyone was concentrating on their own lives. Yaneth left her job at Strycon in February 2014. Then, while communicating with Laura on WhatsApp on the afternoon of September 9, 2014, Yaneth made an offhand remark and asked a question that made them return to the mystery and set their brief, but intense, investigation into overdrive. For some unknown reason Yaneth recalled Jorge and William’s incredible similarity and asked Laura where Jorge was from, whether he might have grown up around La Paz where William had grown up. She also wondered, “What if they got exchanged in the hospital after they were born? Let’s plan a reunion.” It’s hard to judge how serious she was on this particular point, but she was thinking big. Laura agreed to cooperate by finding out where Jorge was born and asking Yaneth for a picture of William so she could show it to Jorge.
* * *
With picture in hand, Laura told Jorge to sit down at his desk at Strycon because he would be shocked. He was, because the face staring back at him in the photograph was his—only the picture was of someone else. He called a coworker to come over and asked, “How do I look in the picture?” “Good,” was the reply. When Jorge told him that the person in the photo was someone else, the coworker refused to believe it, and others in the office had the same reaction. Finally, Laura got around to asking Jorge where he was from, and he said Bogotá, denying that he had relatives in or around La Paz. Jorge was growing increasingly curious, nervous, and fearful, to the point that he didn’t know what to do, and for the next several days got nothing done at work. When something gets into Jorge’s head, he focuses completely on the issue or problem at hand.
People who knew Jorge at work grew curious about his double, and their curiosity turned what had been a game into a more serious investigation because his resemblance to the young man in the picture was so striking. A friend and coworker named Diana started downloading pictures of William from his Facebook page. By now William’s two family names—Cañas Velasco—were known, so Jorge’s coworkers could surf websites and download information from the Internet. Diana, too, was startled by the remarkable similarity of the two young men. She knew that Jorge had a twin brother who looked nothing like him and decided to send a picture of Jorge and Carlos to Yaneth. Meanwhile, Yaneth had downloaded a picture of William with his twin brother, Wilber, and sent it to Diana. Both photos showing the two sets of accidental brothers appeared on Yaneth’s cell phone at the same time. This was a pivotal moment—the emergence of a crucial piece of evidence that strongly suggested that a mistake had been made years earlier. Yaneth no longer had any doubts because Jorge looked exactly like William, and Carlos looked exactly like Wilber, meaning that one twin in each pair had been exchanged. It was scary, and figuring out how it had happened was Yaneth and Laura’s next big challenge. They had to proceed cautiously.
Meanwhile, Jorge was the only one of the four twins to see the two pictures. He was stunned, anxious, and confused to see someone who looked like him in places he had never been, wearing clothes that he didn’t own. More baffling was that, seated next to his likeness in the photo, was an exact replica of Carlos, the twin brother with whom he had grown up. The caption read, “Thank God, one more happy year of life together—brothers forever.” Jorge grew quiet and pale, actually aging before Laura’s eyes. A terrible truth, unthinkable but possible, was taking shape in his mind—he must have an identical twin who had been switched at birth. Most likely out of fear and shock, he uncharacteristically felt powerless and allowed his friends to investigate for him.
While all this was happening, Jorge managed to call his sister, Diana Carolina, to tell her to look at some photos online. Diana was making a bank payment when the call came through, so she didn’t pay much attention to
her brother, who had a tendency to be annoying. He was being especially annoying this time, phoning her about every half hour. Later that afternoon she called him back and turned to the Facebook photos he had told her about. She was unmoved at the sight of William despite his strong resemblance to her brother Jorge, who insisted that she keep looking. But even when she saw Wilber, a nearly identical copy of her other brother, she thought nothing of it. Jorge pleaded with her to pay more attention, adding that he had just learned that their birthdays were only one day apart, but Diana still thought it was all a coincidence.
Later that night Jorge returned to the apartment he shared with Carlos. He found his brother talking on his cell phone and told him to hang up because he needed to tell him something. Jorge began by teasing Carlos, asking if he believed soap operas were true stories, then asked how he would feel if it turned out that they were not really brothers after all. Jorge then started to laugh. At this point Carlos wanted to know what was wrong, and Jorge said he thought he had learned something. As per their usual bantering and bickering, Carlos told him to stop joking, but Jorge continued to laugh as he turned on the computer to locate the telltale pictures. Carlos was relaxed at this point, waiting to find out what was making Jorge act so strangely, but as the shots of William and Wilber popped up on the screen, his expression grew pensive, then grim, and, according to Jorge, he “freaked out.” He wanted to know who these people were, then shut down the computer and raced off to his room. He told Jorge not to bother him anymore about it, warning, “You don’t know what kind of people they are.” But Jorge would not be dissuaded—he wanted the four of them to meet, although he kept asking Laura what kind of people “they” were.
Yaneth did not send William the photos of Jorge and Carlos until the following day, September 10, when she had more revealing information to give him: each twin’s birth date and blood type.
Discoveries
The first key question that had to be settled was whether William and Jorge had been born on the same day. Laura recalled that Jorge’s birthday was December 21, while Yaneth remembered that William was born in December, but at first she didn’t know exactly which day it was. Slowly, she reasoned that he must also have been born on December 21 because her boyfriend, Brian, did not attend a novena—the nine days of devotional prayers that last from December 16 to December 24—held at her home on that day because of William’s birthday. She was certain of that because it was a Saturday. But William’s official birthday is December 22, not December 21, so Yaneth was off by one day; perhaps William celebrated a day early that year. When the two friends realized that there was only a day of difference, they decided it was close enough.
In fact, Ana had given birth to her twins on December 22, just a day after Luz had delivered her twins. Because of the switch William and Carlos traded birthdays (and names), making William’s birthday December 21 and Carlos’s December 22. These incorrect dates of birth appear on their identity cards, or cédulas, and their other official documents. Jorge had learned about this one-day difference in birth dates just as he was phoning his sister to tell her about the probable exchange, and he found it chilling.
Satisfied that William and Jorge shared their actual date of birth and believing that so many similarities could not be mere coincidence, Laura and Yaneth tried to figure out which of the twins might have been switched. It was conceivable that Jorge, not William, had been exchanged and belonged to a different family. If so, this would mean that Wilber, not Carlos, had grown up in the wrong family. The likelihood that a baby exchange had occurred was now less in dispute than how it had come about. At this point Laura and Yaneth didn’t know that Carlos did not resemble anyone in his family; they knew only that he and Jorge did not look alike. They also had to find out how much William and Wilber looked like other members of their family.
Jorge and Carlos’s parents were deceased, and their only other sibling was female. So the best way for Laura and Yaneth to get the answers they needed was to compare the physical resemblance of William and Wilber to that of their three older brothers and older sister still living around La Paz. A good person to consult about this was Yaneth’s boyfriend, Brian, who, as the brothers’ first cousin, knew everyone in the La Paz family. It seemed that all three brothers, and the sister to some extent, looked like Wilber, with the same compact build and angular facial features, but none looked like William—in fact, William didn’t look like any of his relatives. Thus, it seemed clear that William and Carlos were the twins who had been switched, but this did not explain how one got to La Paz and the other got to Bogotá.
Aware that they needed more definitive evidence to confirm the switch, Laura and Yaneth inquired about the blood types and birth histories of both sets of twins. Their blood types were available from their national identity cards, which they are required to carry at all times. The Bogotá brothers did not have matching blood types—Jorge’s was Type A-positive and Carlos’s was Type O-positive. Laura pressed Yaneth hard to find out the blood types of the other two. The La Paz brothers also didn’t match—William was Type A-positive and Wilber was Type O-positive. Most telling was that the identical look-alikes, the young men suspected of being real twins, did match. That was when Laura and Yaneth started to feel really scared because they could not dismiss hard biological data.
In fact, this bit of information was not definitive.3 Identical twins always have matching blood types, and if the blood types of the look-alikes had not matched, Yaneth and Laura might have given up the hunt. However, that they did match did not necessarily mean that Jorge and William, and Carlos and Wilber, were identical twins or that they were even biologically related: fraternal twins, full siblings, and unrelated individuals can have the same major group blood types. In the case of fraternal twins and siblings, parents transmit one gene from each of their tens of thousands of gene pairs to each child, so each gene has a 50-50 chance of being passed on.4
An important reason for caution regarding the young men’s blood types is that 78.75 percent of Colombia’s population has the gene for Type O blood, so any two people randomly chosen from that population could have matching blood groups by chance alone. However, when blood types are relatively less common in a population, the probability increases that two people suspected of being related actually are. The gene for Type A occurs much less frequently than the gene for Type O among Colombians—only 15.55 percent are Type A, but the match between Jorge and William could still have happened by chance.5 Clearly, confirming the biological relatedness of two people requires much more genetic information.
Most current researchers classify twins as identical or fraternal by means of extensive DNA testing. The four in Colombia did not undergo this procedure until early October 2014, several weeks after they first met. Until then, the two twins suspected of having been switched—William and Carlos—could hope that somehow the DNA findings might show that the uncanny resemblances were pure coincidence and that they would awaken from the nightmare that was profoundly shaking their identity.
* * *
The blood type information that Laura and Yaneth uncovered was a small, but nevertheless consistent, addition to their accumulating evidence. In their minds the only remaining mystery was how the switch had come about—how did two babies born one day and 150 miles apart change places? With her usual prescience Yaneth wondered whether the La Paz twins had been brought to Bogotá as newborns for some unknown reason. And, indeed, they learned that one of the La Paz twins had been brought to Bogotá “at seven months” for medical care at a modern hospital. But Laura was confused—she was the mother of a young son and knew that parents can distinguish their own seven-month-old baby from other seven-month-old babies. If Carlos had been exchanged with another infant, his parents would have known it the instant he came home. But Laura had misunderstood—Carlos and Wilber were born prematurely at seven months, just twenty-eight weeks into Ana’s pregnancy, and that was when Carlos was brought to the Bogotá hospital. Twins are fou
r or five times more likely to be born prematurely than nontwins or singletons.6
Jorge and William were also born somewhat early, in Luz’s thirty-fifth week of pregnancy. They were delivered on December 21, two days before Carlos arrived for treatment—this was easy to deduce because he was just one day old when his grandmother brought him to the hospital in Bogotá. But was Carlos treated at the same hospital where Jorge and William were born? That was the next question Laura and Yaneth needed to answer.
At first they had trouble determining the name and location of the hospital. Yaneth heard from William that one baby from La Paz was taken to a clinic in the northern part of Bogotá, but Laura and Yaneth later confirmed that he was brought to the Hospital Materno Infantil in the eastern Santa Fe district. Now Laura needed to ask Jorge where he was born, but he had left for lunch. When Jorge returned an hour later, Yaneth and Laura had their answer: Jorge was born at the Hospital Materno Infantil in Bogotá. Then Laura told him about the matching blood types. He put his hand to his head and said, “Oh, my God, not something else.”
Yaneth and Laura now were convinced that the newborn exchange happened early in the twins’ lives, in the crowded preemie nursery in Bogotá.
* * *
At about this time Laura’s husband, Cristian, begged her to stop searching for clues. He worried that any suggestion that the brothers who grew up together were not really twins would badly damage two families. Cristian believed that if destiny wanted the real twins to meet, it would happen naturally. Laura’s response was that she was part of that destiny.
Terrible Truths
While Laura and Yaneth waited for Jorge to return from lunch, Brian was at the butcher shop with William. The two were laughing together, trying to ease the tense situation, but in truth William’s anxiety was escalating and he was growing increasingly depressed. Then the photographs arrived, the ones showing both unrelated pairs of brothers, and he became “superconcerned.” He screamed at the sight of them, uncertain whether to laugh or weep.
Accidental Brothers Page 11