For most of his life, Kevin McMahon couldn’t explain why he felt like a stranger in his own home – almost like a guest in a family where he was supposed to belong.
Raised in Richmond Hill, Queens, Kevin remembers puzzled glances, stinging silences, and a grandmother’s unspoken scorn that seemed to follow him.
It wasn’t just that he looked different with darker eyes, olive skin, a face that didn’t look much like others in the family photo – it was something deeper, harder to name and impossible to prove, reports the New York Post.
But in 2020, six decades after he was born at Jamaica Hospital in Queens, the suspicions that had nagged Kevin for most of his life were suddenly confirmed after his sister took a DNA test on a genealogy website.
What Kevin learned upended everything he thought he knew about his identity: he had been switched at birth with another baby boy, born just 45 minutes after him, with the same last name – and placed into the wrong family.
‘It was like the missing piece in the jigsaw puzzle,’ McMahon told the Post. ‘[It] explained everything about why my childhood was the way that it was.’
At the age of 64, McMahon has now filed a lawsuit in Queens Civil Court against Jamaica Hospital, accusing the institution of catastrophic negligence that tore two families apart before they had even left the maternity ward.
On May 26, 1960, Kevin McMahon was born at Jamaica Hospital. Just 45 minutes later so was Ross McMahon.
Both infants were tagged simply ‘Baby McMahon.’ Their birth certificates were even stamped with consecutive numbers.
For most of his life, Kevin McMahon, third from left, felt different to his brothers and sister. He recently found out he had been switched at birth. From left, Raymond, Carol, Kevin and Donald McMahon
Kevin is seen left, while the true biological brother to the siblings, Ross, is seen to the right of the painting on the wall next to Carol, his biological sister. Keith, who is Kevin’s biological brother, is seen wearing the black ‘Rush’ shirt on the right
Kevin McMahon finally learned the truth in 2020 when Carol Vignola, 66, pictured, the woman he knew as his sister, submitted her DNA to Ancestry.com and discovered she had a biological brother she had been completely unaware of
And it appears that somewhere in the chaos of a busy maternity ward, someone made a terrible error.
According to Kevin’s lawsuit, the mistake led to him being switched at birth, handed to the wrong parents, and growing up in a home where his presence seemed to be questioned from the very beginning.
Kevin’s childhood was marked not just by confusion, but by cruelty too.
Family members, especially his grandmother, seemed to harbor an unspoken belief that he wasn’t truly ‘one of them.’
‘She believed that I was not my father’s child, and she was correct,’ Kevin told the Post. ‘It made me feel worthless. It destroyed my confidence.’
His appearance, darker and more Mediterranean compared to the fair-skinned, blue-eyed family who raised him, became an invisible line between him and a sense of belonging.
‘I had certain interactions with my grandmother that were abusive, physically abusive, and I learned to fear her and just stay away,’ Kevin recalled.
A chain of events soon unravelled the truth which began with a gut-held belief Kevin’s sister, Carol Vignola, now 66.
Kevin, pictured as a baby, said his father always treated him differently growing up
Kevin was switched in the hospital with Ross McMahon, pictured here as a baby. The pair shared the same last name and were born 45 minutes apart
‘I was probably 7,’ she told the New York Post. ‘He was laying on his bunk bed without a shirt on… and I said, “Kevin, you came from the milkman.”‘
Even as a child Carol noticed Kevin didn’t look like the rest of them.
She remembers confronting her mother, asking why Kevin’s appearance was so different.
The response was sharp and immediate: ‘Don’t you ever speak like that, Carol. That’s your brother.’
But the question never truly went away and in 2020, Carol submitted her DNA to Ancestry.com.
The results revealed she had a biological brother – someone she had never met, and that man was not Kevin but Ross McMahon.
When Carol showed the results to Kevin, he was in complete disbelief.
‘[It was] like a shock reaction. I literally couldn’t come to terms with the information,’ he said. ‘I thought to myself, “I’m nobody … I don’t exist.”‘
Kevin took his own DNA test in January 2021 and confirmed that he was not biologically related to the family that raised him.
Both infants were tagged simply ‘Baby McMahon.’ Their birth certificates were even stamped with consecutive numbers. Pictured, Kevin McMahon’s birth certificate
Ross McMahon’s birth certificate was just one digit away from Kevin’s
Instead, he had a different family and even a biological brother named Keith McMahon.
Additional blood tests confirmed what the DNA had already made plain.
Kevin and Keith were brothers. Carol and Ross were siblings.
The two ‘McMahon’ babies born on the same day had been accidentally swapped a horrifying mix-up hidden for decades under the matching last names.
Neither Ross McMahon nor Keith have spoken publicly about the case, and all four parents involved have now died never knowing the truth about their children.
Kevin can’t help but wonder what his life might have been like had he grown up in the home that was rightfully his.
‘I have a little bit of jealousy,’ Kevin admitted. ‘My [biological] father was Ross’s biggest fan, always had his back. I would have loved to have that.’
Instead, Kevin endured a boyhood of doubt, discipline, and distance.
His supposed father, the man who raised him, never showed him the same warmth he extended to Kevin’s younger and older siblings.
‘I feared my father. I got hit a lot when I was a kid… I just thought my father didn’t really care for me,’ he said heartbreakingly.
Kevin’s attorney, Jeremy Schiowitz, isn’t letting the hospital off the hook and says Jamaica Hospital’s failure to ensure proper infant identification is a betrayal that has permanently scarred two families.
‘This wasn’t a fluke. This was a preventable tragedy,’ Schiowitz said. ‘With the rise of DNA testing, we’re going to see more of these stories come to light. Kevin’s just happens to be one of the first.’
Kevin is seeking unspecified financial damages – but more than money, he wants an apology from the hospital and an acknowledgement that mistakes were made. So far, the hospital has not responded to his lawsuit.
‘It makes them seem cold and heartless that they’re not even coming across and acknowledging that this took place,’ Kevin said.
