Where Do They Belong?

Paula Johnson is sitting on the steps behind the little brown house she rents on a road called Morning Glory. She draws hard on a long More cigarette, one of many she’ll suck down during this week from hell. The day before, she made her national television debut, explaining through streaming mascara that she has no idea how one of a parent’s worst nightmares had come true for her. Somehow her daughter is not her daughter, at least biologically. Somehow the girl she gave birth to on June 29, 1995, apparently was swapped with a girl born a few hours later to a 16-year-old cheerleader named Whitney Rogers. Somehow nothing makes sense anymore.

A car rolls up the driveway. It’s a delivery–a bouquet of white lillies and red zinnias from the Maury Povich Show. “Our hearts go out to you,” says the note. Roseanne has called. So has Barbara Walters. So far, Johnson has said no to TV people: “I don’t want to get on the circuit.” It will just lead to more sleepless nights groggily flipping through channels that are all the same: SWITCHED AT BIRTH, the graphics screech. Her picture is everywhere.

Johnson tosses pebbles at the pink plastic tricycle in her backyard in Ruckersville, a small Virginia town in the shadow of the Blue Ridge Mountains. The tricycle belongs to Callie, the three-year-old doll who likes to suck ice on summer days and watch Jeff Gordon drive his race car–the three-year-old who University of Virginia Medical Center officials believe is the biological daughter of Rogers, not Johnson. Which would mean that Johnson’s genetic child is the girl that Rogers and her boyfriend Kevin Chittum named Rebecca. They were raising her a couple of hours away, in Buena Vista–at least until they were killed on July 4 in the nation’s worst car accident that day.

Outside of the Bible and the Lifetime network, such baroque tragedies aren’t supposed to happen. Which is why it was surprising last week to see both families seeming to cope so well. Johnson told TIME on her back stoop that she had no plans to try to wrest Rebecca from the grandparents who have taken care of her since the accident. “But it don’t mean I don’t love her,” she added, saying she wants to be part of the girl’s life. And the Rogers and Chittum families too seemed to think love trumps DNA. Both Linda Rogers–Whitney’s mother–and the Chittum family lawyer told TIME that the girls shouldn’t be switched again.

The Chittums met with Johnson on Friday, and the Rogerses were set to meet with her over the weekend, hoping to work out shared custody in living rooms rather than courtrooms. They hoped to get to know one another and raise the children as an extended family. For now, Johnson was even saying she wouldn’t sue the hospital that may have caused her misery: “Money can’t change the fact that my child was switched,” she sighs. “I live on a thousand dollars a month. Money would help, but it don’t mean anything to me.” At a time when legal battles over a stained Gap dress have paralyzed Washington, the cooperative spirit of these families a few miles to the south was refreshing.

By week’s end, however, there were signs that no matter how much the folks involved want to get along, family squabbles could shatter their best intentions. Evidence emerged last week that the home in which Johnson has been raising Callie hasn’t been the most tranquil. Carlton Conley, Johnson’s sometime boyfriend and possibly Rebecca’s biological father, was convicted of assault and battery in April. Johnson said Conley had shoved her, rammed her car with his truck and in January threatened to shoot her. (Small wonder, then, that last year Johnson obtained a state permit to carry a concealed firearm.)

Then, late Thursday, Melissa Conley–Carlton’s sister–told TIME that Johnson was lying during the televised news conference that had gripped the country Wednesday. Through her own tears, Melissa, 41, said that she was in the delivery room and she saw an ID bracelet on Johnson’s baby before she was taken from the room. Johnson has said that her baby was whisked away for tests before a bracelet was attached. If it turns out there’s even the flimsiest of allegations linking Johnson to the switch–and there is no evidence of that now–the two families would doubtless end up in an unprecedented court battle.

Johnson’s lawyer wouldn’t speak with TIME about Conley’s allegations (or anything else). But Johnson herself had previously rejected any suggestion that she was involved. Hospital officials, she says, “act like I went into Wal-Mart and switched my baby. I’m not … a rocket scientist, but I’m not an idiot. Why would I switch my kid? It doesn’t make sense.” It’s also worth mentioning that Melissa Conley and Johnson don’t get along and that Melissa nurses a grudge toward her brother’s ex. “I’m scared of this woman,” Melissa told TIME. “She is capable of doing anything.”

For their part, before they learned of the switch, the Rogers and Chittum families had already debated who would raise their granddaughter after the deaths of Kevin and Whitney. (They had worked out a four-month rotation for each set of grandparents.) And some family members admitted to USA Today that after they learned of the switch, they tried to avoid being discovered as the family with Johnson’s biological baby because they feared they would lose the girl.

Of course, it’s wrong to judge people in the most harrowing moments of their lives, but lawyers say these are just the sorts of factors that could come up in a custody war. As we try to see what’s in Callie and Rebecca’s future, it helps to look to their families’ pasts.

Paula Johnson grew up the daughter of divorced parents in Manassas, Va., outside Washington, and moved to Ruckersville five years ago. Now 30, she is the divorced mother of three boys in addition to the switched daughter. She also has custody of an unrelated 16-year-old girl. “My mom says other kids brought home stray dogs and cats,” she says. “I brought home stray people.” Johnson raises her family on the $9.07 an hour she earns as a flagger at construction sites. “TV dinners and hamburger casseroles” help make ends meet.

Though they are on better terms now, Carlton Conley and Johnson have fought so much they should be in a Tammy Wynette song. She threw him out in January 1995 because, Johnson says, “he spent more time hunting and fishing than he did with his family.” Johnson herself is no shrinking violet: she was convicted in 1994 of a very Southern civil infraction called “curse and abuse.” She apparently had called a school official a “fat b___” and run at the woman’s car. Conley and Johnson often wrangled over his $75 a week child-support payment for Callie–so much so that Melissa says she told her brother to use a money order for each payment, so he would have a record.

It was that bickering that led to the discovery of Callie’s genetic identity: as is routine in child-support disputes, a local judge ordered paternity tests to determine whether Conley had in fact fathered Callie. But tests showed that neither he nor Johnson was the girl’s genetic parent. It’s unclear whether Conley fathered Rebecca. His sister Melissa says another man may be the father. But Conley himself now seems to want to stand by his ex-girlfriend. He sat with her nervously at the press conference and said he wants to help raise both girls. (He refused to speak with TIME.)

For their part, the Rogerses have struggled to manage tragedies that would test Job. Linda and Tommy Rogers, both 47, the bereaved parents of Whitney, are divorced but remain friends. Linda and Brenda Rogers, Tommy’s current wife (who says she is in her 30s), have amicably shared care of Rebecca since the car accident. All three were close to Whitney and Kevin, who were living in Linda’s home with Rebecca and her 18-month-old “sister” Lindsey while the young couple saved to build a dream house of their own. Chittum, a running back in high school, owned part of his family’s construction company. Financially mature for a 25-year-old, he had already purchased eight acres of land near Natural Bridge for the home, in addition to furniture and a big-screen TV.

The dreams died on Interstate 81. Chittum, Rogers and five others were killed when his car smashed into a fuel truck during a violent rainstorm. Police told USA Today that Chittum wasn’t technically speeding but was going too fast on the slickened highway. The tragedy was the biggest news in tight-knit Buena Vista in years; the funeral drew 800 mourners.

The Rogerses still refuse to acknowledge that Rebecca isn’t genetically one of theirs. Blame it on shell shock: on July 21, only 2 1/2 weeks after the accident, the hospital told them Rebecca wasn’t their granddaughter. Perhaps foreshadowing a lawsuit, the Rogerses say hospital officials cruelly ignored their grief. Linda says a pediatrician called her at the Wal-Mart pharmacy, where she works, to tell her he had news about Rebecca he had to relay in person. Later a doctor showed up with a syringe, asking for Rebecca’s blood for a DNA test. (Hospital officials believe Rebecca is Johnson’s biological daughter because of blood-type tests, which are much less certain than DNA tests.) “It’s just like we were going to do this hush-hush,” Linda says. “They were very unprofessional.” The Rogerses refused to let them test Rebecca’s blood until last week, when their lawyer told them a judge would probably order the test anyway. Hospital officials deny they were insensitive to the Rogerses and say they provided the family access to around-the-clock counseling.

The Rogerses say they remember Whitney’s baby got an ID bracelet just moments after her birth. They say they even have a videotape showing the baby’s banding. Someone could have swapped the bands later, but right now no one is sure how the switch occurred. And according to at least one source, the university and the state police have few leads so far. “I don’t see any particular heat behind the investigation right now,” said a law-enforcement source whom the investigators consulted for advice last week. Among the mysteries those investigators should try to puzzle out:

–Johnson says that when she was discharged from the hospital, the baby she took home was weighed at 7 lbs., 12 oz. But just after birth her child had weighed 9 lbs., 6 oz. Babies often shed a few ounces in the hours after birth, but not 17% of their body weight. Hospital chief of staff Dr. Thomas Massaro admits the hospital can’t explain why the large discrepancy went unnoticed. “We don’t understand that,” he says, though he is virtually positive there was no accidental switch in this case. “We have very good documentation that the band was properly put on,” he says. “I have checked, a dozen other doctors have checked, a dozen nurses.” He notes that removing four ID bracelets from two children would be extremely difficult. The wristband is hard enough, he says. “Getting the ankle one off, you would almost have to break the foot.”

–Johnson returned to the hospital the same day because her baby wouldn’t feed. She says hospital personnel then took the ID band off the baby. The baby was admitted for three days, during which time the other baby was still in the hospital.

–Melissa Conley, who drove Johnson home after the delivery, says she remembers Johnson asking the doctor discharging her what blood type Callie had. “The doctor says it was not her type, that Callie had O-negative, which is rare,” Conley says. “Then Paula said, ‘She must have her father’s,’ and got real quiet.”

Myriad scenarios were offered last week by hospital-security experts. A nurse or doctor with a grudge could have switched the bands. The bands could have fallen off both babies and been reattached incorrectly–or (more likely) might never have been attached correctly in the first place. A Las Vegas consulting firm interviewed more than 400 maternity-ward employees across the U.S. two years ago for a study on baby switching. From those interviews, Steve Kaufer of Inter/Action Associates guesses that 1 out of every 1,000 infant transfers in hospitals–the baby to the mother, the baby to its bassinet, the baby to the nursery–is a mistake. (Last week University of Virginia officials said they were 99.9% certain the hospital didn’t make a mistake with Callie and Rebecca–leaving open the very 0.1% chance estimated by Inter/Action.) Almost none of those mistakes are permanent, but every year two or three babies in the U.S. probably go home with the wrong mothers. “Even the best hospitals make these mistakes,” says John Rabun, a maternity-ward-security specialist.

What happens if the parents and grandparents in this case end up in court? Virginia lawyers say Johnson would have a decent shot at winning custody of both children–Callie because she has raised her, and Rebecca because the girl is genetically hers and currently has no other parent. The state general assembly passed a law several years ago allowing nonbiological third parties to win custody from biological parents if they can show that such an arrangement would be in “the best interest of the child.” (Prior to the passage of the law, judges had to rule in favor of biological parents automatically.) If the grandparents went this route, however, they would have to meet a higher standard of proof than Johnson that they represent Rebecca’s “best interest”; the law still favors biology. The most important wild card is the judge: Virginia family judges now have wide authority to interpret the facts of each case.

For now, though, everyone is still hoping the families can return to the warm glow of last week’s news conference. “I’m just really impressed with what the families are doing; it’s rare,” says Renee Garfinkel, editor of Adoption Quarterly. Even though this case has the potential trappings of a strife-filled made-for-TV drama, with patience and understanding, it doesn’t have to become one.

–Reported by Ann Blackman/Ruckersville and Chandrani Ghosh/Buena Vista