'Where I was supposed to be': US man taken as infant in illegal Chilean adoption meets lost family

[Judi Lynn]

(Similar story to one posted here hours earlier, US man stolen from Chilean mom, different people!)

Story by Amanda Lee Myers, USA TODAY •
16h

A California man who recently learned he was taken from his mother in Chile and illegally adopted to an American couple hugged the sister he should have grown up with during their emotional first meeting this week.

Scott Lieberman of San Francisco flew into his big sister's arms moments after landing in Concepción in central Chile on Tuesday.

The two gripped each other tightly and sobbed for several minutes. Then Lieberman got to meet nearly two dozen other family members who showed up to the airport as a surprise.

"I'm still kind of processing everything, and I probably will be for a while now – months if not years," the 42-year-old Lieberman told USA TODAY from Cañete, Chile.

As he spoke, his newfound sister, 45-year-old Jenny Escalona Mardones, frequently rubbed his back and leaned her head on his.

"This is where I was supposed to be," he said.

A Chilean family ripped apart

For decades, Lieberman said that neither he nor his adoptive parents knew how he became separated from his mother as an infant. One day Lieberman came across an article in People Magazine about a Texas firefighter stolen at birth from his mother in Chile, and something clicked.

"The limited knowledge I knew about my adoption, it all made more sense in that one article than what I had been told and what I had thought my entire life," he said.

So Lieberman reached out to Nos Buscamos, an NGO dedicated to reuniting the estimated thousands of people with the Chilean families they were taken from as babies in the 1970s and 1980s.

. . .



More:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/where-i-was-supposed-to-be-us-man-taken-as-infant-in-illegal-chilean-adoption-meets-lost-family/ar-AA19TwCm

(Lieberman's in the back row, just right of center, in the black shirt.)

[ejbr]

1. His smile in that picture

Is so beautiful it literally made me cry.