Exclusive | LI man was switched at birth with baby who had the same last name and discovered mix-up on ancestry site 60 years later: suit

A Long Island man was switched at birth with a baby born minutes apart who had his same last name — and only learned the awful truth through ancestry.com, he told The Post in heartbreaking detail.Kevin McMahon, 64, who is suing Jamaica Hospital in Queens over the alleged screw-up that occurred May 26, 1960, said DNA tests confirmed his painful nagging suspicion that he wasn’t his parents’ biological son.“It was like the missing piece in the jigsaw puzzle,” said McMahon, who works in telecommunications and was raised in Richmond Hill, Queens.“[It] explained everything about why my childhood was the way that it was.”McMahon said he grew up tormented by some family members because they suspected he wasn’t a blood relative.The Selden man finally learned the devastating truth in 2020 when the woman he knew as his sister, Carol Vignola, 66, submitted her DNA to the genetic database ancestry.com and discovered she had a biological brother she was unaware of, according to Kevin’s lawsuit filed in Queens Civil Court in November 2021.The other man was named Ross McMahon, and he had been born 45 minutes apart from Kevin at the same hospital, according to court papers.The infants were given consecutive birth-certificate numbers, both tagged “Baby McMahon” — and then allegedly handed to the wrong parents.The DNA results confirmed Vignola’s longtime gut feeling that Kevin wasn’t related to her, in part because of his darker eyes and complexion.She took the news to Kevin, and he was rocked by disbelief and grief, having suffered through a tormented childhood.“[It was] like a shock reaction.

I literally couldn’t come to terms with the information,” Kevin said.“For a long time, I’m like, I’m not really Kevin McMahon.I’m really Ross McMahon,” he said.  “I thought to myself, ‘I’m nobody … I don’t exist.’ “It’s just hard to deal with, just hard,” he said.In January 2021, Kevin took his own ancestry.com test and got the...