It’s 1980 and Steve Carter Sr. is pulling duty as a US Army officer out on Oahu, Hawaii. While he’s stationed there, he and his wife, Pat, a teacher, make a decision that’ll 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 was Tenzin Aumyea, and he’d already spent three long years bouncing through state care. His file said the blond-haired baby’s father was an anonymous Native Hawaiian. His white mother was listed as Jane Aumyea, and she’d 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 looked like Tenzin’s story was finally taking a turn.
They renamed him William Steven Tenzin Carter, Steve Jr. to everyone who knew him, and just like that, he was starting fresh with the Carters in a nice part of Southern New Jersey. All through the ’80s and ’90s, the kid had the kind of childhood you’d want for anyone. Sports, block parties, running around with the neighborhood crew. Eventually, Steve grew up, moved out, and carved his own path in the software world. But somewhere in the back of his mind, a question kept nagging at him. Who were his real parents? Here’s the thing, his supposed Hawaiian roots had basically become a running joke in the family.
“Blond hair, blue eyes, pale skin,” Steve Sr. flat out told 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 came back? Nobody saw it coming. Turns out the guy is Scandinavian, not even close to Hawaiian. So now the mystery isn’t just unsolved, it’s deeper than ever. And for a while it looked like the truth about where Steve came from might stay buried forever.
Then something unexpected happened. He stumbled onto a news story that lit the whole thing back up. In 2011, Steve read about Carlina White, an African-American woman who’d 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’s when the truth finally cracked wide open. That aspect of the story is exactly what lit a fire under Steve. Finding lost relatives and digging into genealogy had gotten a whole lot easier since the internet came along.
So Steve pulled up one of the sites Carlina had used, missingkids.com. It’s run by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and Steve started scrolling through listings looking for anything that might connect. Then he landed on an entry for a missing boy and everything stopped. The listing identified the kid as Marx Panama Moriarty Barnes reported missing since June 1977. And right there next to the entry was an age progressed sketch. An artist’s best guess at what Marx might look like as a grown man. Steve stared at it. It was his own face looking back at him.
“I got chills,” he told people in 2012. “I was like, holy crap, it’s me.”
Completely blindsided, Steve reached out to the authorities and offered up his DNA for testing. Then came the waiting, eight agonizing months of it. When the results finally landed, they confirmed what his gut already knew. Steve and Marx were the same person. His wife, Tracy, pushed him to start pulling at the threads of this new past, but what unraveled was nothing short of devastating. On June 21st, 1977, a journalist and Vietnam veteran named Mark Barnes was out in the garden of his place in Paaula on Oahu, Hawaii.
While he was working the soil, his girlfriend, Charlotte Moriarty, decided to take their 6-month-old son for a walk. She told Mark she was heading a few blocks over to hit the grocery store with little Marx. Simple enough, but Charlotte never came back. At first, Mark didn’t panic. By all accounts, Charlotte was a free spirit, the kind of person who’d disappear on a whim and drift back when she felt like it. But three full weeks crawled by with no word from her, no sign of the baby, and that’s when Mark finally called the police. The search kicked off, but it went nowhere, not a single lead. For over a year, Mark walked the streets of Hawaii, broken but relentless, scanning every face and hoping for some miracle. And no matter how much time stacked up, months, then years, he apparently never stopped believing he’d see his son again.
What he had no way of knowing was that Marx was already living a completely different life, under a completely different name, with a completely different family, thousands of miles from where he’d started. Reportedly, the day after Charlotte vanished with Marks in the summer of 1977, a woman on the opposite side of Oahu came 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 called the cops. When officers showed up, Charlotte gave them completely made up names, Jane and Tenzin Aimia, along with a fake date of birth for the child. Because of those lies, when Mark reported Marks missing 3 weeks later, Hawaii police had no way to connect the two cases.
And here’s the gut punch. Before Mark even had a chance to start looking for his boy, the kid now called Tenzin had already slipped through the cracks. Charlotte was soon placed in a psychiatric facility, and Marks was handed over to state care. In a twist that’s almost too cruel to believe, the boy ended up in an orphanage just 30 miles from his biological father’s home. Then, only days after being admitted, Charlotte checked herself out of the hospital and vanished into thin air. And when she disappeared, she took the truth about her son with her. But Mark wasn’t the only one haunted by Marks’s absence. Jennifer, Marks’s half sister, 8 years older than him, never stopped wondering what happened to him, either.
In 2001, she pushed hard enough to convince the Hawaii authorities to crack the case back open. As part of that effort, they brought in an artist to create an age-progressed sketch of what Marks 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 broke open after more than three decades, Steve didn’t rush into anything. He flat-out admitted to People magazine that he was terrified. But after months of sitting with it, he picked up the phone and called Jennifer. And eventually, he got on the line with his biological father, too. Mark, who by then had moved back to his home state of California. When Mark heard his son’s voice, all he could manage was,
“All I could say was, wow. Oh, wow. Wow.”
Back in New Jersey, the news hit the Carters hard. Learning that their Steve Jr. was also Mark’s, also Tenzin, that was a lot to process.
“On an emotional level, I felt like we’d taken someone else’s child,” Pat admitted to People.
But with time, they found their footing. As Pat told 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 hadn’t all been in the same room together, but a reunion was right around the corner. And even though the whole journey had been an emotional roller coaster for everyone involved, the Carters held on to one thing that mattered. Their story had the power to give hope to other families still searching for someone they’ve 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.
