30 Years After Being Adopted As A Baby, This Man Recognized His Own Face On A Missing Persons List
It is 1980, and Steve Carter Sr. is pulling duty as a US Army officer out on Oahu, Hawaii. While he is stationed there, he and his wife, Pat, a teacher, make a decision that will change everything. They want to adopt. And the moment they meet this 3 and 1/2 year-old boy stuck in the foster care system, something just clicks.
“It was love at first sight,” Pat would later tell People magazine back in 2012.
On September 23rd of that same year, Steve and Pat finally bring the kid home for good. According to the paperwork out of Hawaii, the boy’s name is Tenzin Aumyea, and he has already spent three long years bouncing through state care. His file says the blond-haired baby’s father is an anonymous Native Hawaiian. His white mother is listed as Jane Aumyea, and she had been arrested when Tenzin was barely 5 months old. So, by June of 1977, this tiny kid had already been swallowed up by the system. But now, it looks like Tenzin’s story is finally taking a turn.
They rename him William Steven Tenzin Carter, Steve Jr. to everyone who knows him, and just like that, he is starting fresh with the Carters in a nice part of Southern New Jersey. All through the ’80s and ’90s, the kid has the kind of childhood you would want for anyone. Sports, block parties, running around with the neighborhood crew. Eventually, Steve grows up, moves out, and carves his own path in the software world. But somewhere in the back of his mind, a question keeps nagging at him. Who are his real parents? Here is the thing, his supposed Hawaiian roots have basically become a running joke in the family.
“Blond hair, blue eyes, pale skin,” Steve Sr. flat out tells the South Jersey paper, “He does not strike one as being of Polynesian extraction.”
And then Christmas rolls around and somebody hands Steve Jr. a DNA testing kit. What comes back? Nobody saw it coming. Turns out the guy is Scandinavian, not even close to Hawaiian. So now the mystery is not just unsolved, it is deeper than ever. And for a while it looks like the truth about where Steve came from might stay buried forever.
Then something unexpected happens. He stumbles onto a news story that lights the whole thing back up. In 2011, Steve reads about Carlina White, an African-American woman who had been snatched from a hospital in Harlem when she was just a baby. She grew up in Connecticut completely in the dark, thinking her kidnapper was her actual mother. Meanwhile, her real mom and dad were living less than 45 minutes away the entire time. But at 23, Carlina started digging through missing persons databases online and that is when the truth finally cracked wide open. That aspect of the story is exactly what lights a fire under Steve. Finding lost relatives and digging into genealogy had gotten a whole lot easier since the internet came along.
So Steve pulls up one of the sites Carlina had used, missingkids.com. It is run by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and Steve starts scrolling through listings looking for anything that might connect. Then he lands on an entry for a missing boy and everything stops. The listing identifies the kid as Marx Panama Moriarty Barnes, reported missing since June 1977. And right there next to the entry is an age-progressed sketch. An artist’s best guess at what Marx might look like as a grown man. Steve stares at it. It is his own face looking back at him.
“I got chills,” he tells people in 2012. “I was like, holy crap, it’s me.”
Completely blindsided, Steve reaches out to the authorities and offers up his DNA for testing. Then comes the waiting, eight agonizing months of it. When the results finally land, they confirm what his gut already knows. Steve and Marx are the same person. His wife, Tracy, pushes him to start pulling at the threads of this new past, but what unravels is nothing short of devastating.
On June 21st, 1977, a journalist and Vietnam veteran named Mark Barnes is out in the garden of his place in Paaula on Oahu, Hawaii. While he is working the soil, his girlfriend, Charlotte Moriarty, decides to take their 6-month-old son for a walk. She tells Mark she is heading a few blocks over to hit the grocery store with little Marx. Simple enough, but Charlotte never comes back. At first, Mark does not panic. By all accounts, Charlotte was a free spirit, the kind of person who would disappear on a whim and drift back when she felt like it. But three full weeks crawl by with no word from her, no sign of the baby, and that is when Mark finally calls the police. The search kicks off, but it goes nowhere, not a single lead. For over a year, Mark walks the streets of Hawaii, broken but relentless, scanning every face and hoping for some miracle. And no matter how much time stacks up, months, then years, he apparently never stops believing he will see his son again.
What he has no way of knowing is that Marx is already living a completely different life, under a completely different name, with a completely different family, thousands of miles from where he had started. Reportedly, the day after Charlotte vanishes with Marx in the summer of 1977, a woman on the opposite side of Oahu comes home to find uninvited visitors inside her house. Somehow, Charlotte had gotten in and was just hanging around with the baby. Understandably alarmed, the homeowner calls the cops. When officers show up, Charlotte gives them completely made up names, Jane and Tenzin Aumyea, along with a fake date of birth for the child. Because of those lies, when Mark reports Marx missing 3 weeks later, Hawaii police have no way to connect the two cases.
And here is the gut punch. Before Mark even has a chance to start looking for his boy, the kid now called Tenzin has already slipped through the cracks. Charlotte is soon placed in a psychiatric facility, and Marx is handed over to state care. In a twist that is almost too cruel to believe, the boy ends up in an orphanage just 30 miles from his biological father’s home. Then, only days after being admitted, Charlotte checks herself out of the hospital and vanishes into thin air. And when she disappears, she takes the truth about her son with her.
But Mark is not the only one haunted by Marx’s absence. Jennifer, Marx’s half-sister, 8 years older than him, never stops wondering what happened to him, either. In 2001, she pushes hard enough to convince the Hawaii authorities to crack the case back open. As part of that effort, they bring in an artist to create an age-progressed sketch of what Marx might look like as a grown man. And that single image, that composite drawing, is the exact one that would eventually lead Steve to uncover who he really was.
When the truth finally breaks open after more than three decades, Steve does not rush into anything. He flat-out admits to People magazine that he is terrified. But after months of sitting with it, he picks up the phone and calls Jennifer. And eventually, he gets on the line with his biological father, too. Mark, who by then had moved back to his home state of California. When Mark hears his son’s voice, all he can manage is:
“All I could say was, wow. Oh, wow. Wow.”
Back in New Jersey, the news hits the Carters hard. Learning that their Steve Jr. was also Mark’s, also Tenzin, that is a lot to process.
“On an emotional level, I felt like we’d taken someone else’s child,” Pat admits to People.
But with time, they find their footing. As Pat tells the talk show The View in 2012:
“It’s taken a while for us to get used to the idea that we have to share him, but I’m sure it’s going to be wonderful.”
As of 2012, Mark, Jennifer, and the Carter family still have not all been in the same room together, but a reunion is right around the corner. And even though the whole journey has been an emotional roller coaster for everyone involved, the Carters hold on to one thing that matters. Their story has the power to give hope to other families still searching for someone they have lost. And for Mark and Jennifer, it was Steve’s stubborn curiosity and the reach of the internet that brought them closer to their long-lost family than they ever imagined possible.
