Two parents from Utah in the United States were stunned to find they were raising a stranger’s son after taking a family DNA test to learn more about their heritage.
“Reading the DNA test results online, I thought there had been a mistake,” the mother, Donna Johnson, 47, said in an article in “The Sun” on Sunday.
In 2020, the woman, her husband Vanner and their two sons, ages 12 and 18, took a DNA test “for fun” to learn more about their genetic heritage, the mom recounted in the article. .
Except that by obtaining the results, the woman was shocked to learn that the father of the youngest, conceived by in vitro fertilization, was not her spouse.
Indeed, they discovered that there would have been a problem at the clinic, so that the sperm of a stranger would have been used instead of that of the spouse, to fertilize the egg.
For the couple, the news would have had the effect of a bomb, even if they would have quickly been reassured by a lawyer that they would remain the legal parents of their 12-year-old son, Tim.
However, by learning the news to their son in October 2020, the latter would have shown his interest in meeting his biological father. After some research, they were able to trace him more than eight hours from their home in Colorado.
Devin McNeil, 47, and his wife Kelly, 46, agreed to take a DNA test, to corroborate the results of the test taken by Tim.
Eventually, the two couples agreed that he won’t have a custody battle, as they consider Vanner to be Tim’s father, the British tabloid added.