Rebecca Grace Chittum, “Becca” to her relatives, is a brown-haired 3-year-old with a gift of gab and a mind of her own. She loves to play ball and go to the park. She calls her grandparents Paw-Paw, Maw-maw, Rosie and Granny. They adore her.
Callie Marie Jewel Johnson is a curly haired blond thought to be one day older than Rebecca. She watches auto racing on television and loves race-car driver Jeff Gordon. Her mother, Paula Johnson, 31, calls her “absolutely wonderful” and reports with pride that she was a second runner-up in the Tiny Miss Greene County Fair beauty pageant July 11.
“I’m really lucky,” she said.
These innocent, lovable toddlers once led quiet lives an hour’s drive apart in the center of Blue Ridge Mountain country.
Now, they have become major players in a national drama that touches every parent’s heart and challenges legal minds. Tragically, inexplicably, they may have been switched at birth, one of a parent’s worst nightmares and a tangle of the first order.
Paula Johnson met with one set of Rebecca’s grandparents for the first time Friday, a relative said, and planned to meet the other grandparents soon.
The relative described the meetings as “an effort to get acquainted” and “look in each other’s eyes and know the pain they are going through.”
The pain has been intense in this bizarre affair, testing the families, the hospital where the babies were born and the communities where they live. Baby-switching is a rare occurrence in America with hospital procedures designed to prevent it. But the current case shows that it delivers a hard blow to those who have to deal with it, perhaps even harder than death.
Death, no matter how horrible, is a part of life that people learn to cope with, said Theresa Chittum, a niece to one of the grandparents of Rebecca. Yet nothing prepared the family for anything like this. “I’m tough, real tough,” she said. “I put on a real good show, but my heart is broke forever.”
The families wait for genetic testing to be completed that will prove beyond doubt whether Rebecca is actually Paula Johnson’s biological daughter and Callie is the daughter of Kevin Chittum and Whitney Rogers.
At the same time, the Chittum and Rogers families are learning to cope with tragedy piled upon tragedy. Kevin, 25, and Whitney, 19, died July 4 in a head-on collision on Interstate Highway 81 without ever knowing that Rebecca might not have been their baby.
The couple had just bought their first home, a fix-me-up that challenged Kevin’s carpentry skills. They had bought all the appliances, and he had put in some windows. On the front window, Whitney had scrawled his name, her name and her two children’s names in the dust created by all his labor.
Out back sits a swing set they intended for Rebecca and her 18-month-old sister, Lindsey. “He was going to add a porch,” said a friend, Laura, who did not want her last name used.
Rebecca has Whitney’s personality, said Theresa Chittum. The little girl would pick up hammers as her father was working and bonded with males–“none of that prissy stuff.”
Rebecca loved to go to the park and play ball with her uncle Travis. Linda Rogers, Whitney’s mother, said that the young couple’s idea of a good time was to take their family to local places. “They loved Chuck E. Cheese,” she said, referring to the national children’s pizza parlor chain.
Paula Johnson discovered July 3 that Callie was neither her boyfriend’s baby nor her own, the finding of a DNA test required in a child-support case she had filed against Carlton Conley, 34.
That discovery touched off a search for her real baby. On July 20, Linda Rogers was working at Wal-Mart in nearby Lexington when she received a call from a pediatrician at the University of Virginia Medical Center. He said he wanted to come by and talk about Rebecca. He did not say why.
The next day, the doctor and a nurse with a syringe showed up on the front porch to break the news that Rebecca might be someone else’s baby and to seek a blood sample and fingerprints. Still trying to get over one tragedy, Rogers was upset by the way the explosive information was handled. “I was shocked at how unprofessionally it was done,” she said.
How the two babies might have been switched in the hospital three years ago is a mystery that authorities at the University of Virginia Medical Center painstakingly are trying to sort out. The university, facing possible legal liability, angered both families by suggesting that the mistake could not have been accidental.
The hospital’s system of using wrist and leg bracelets to identify mother and child immediately on delivery is common across the United States. The case may cause a re-examination of such procedures throughout the country.
Johnson took issue with the hospital’s early version of events, insisting that she and her baby were not “banded” immediately when she delivered late on June 29, 1995, because her daughter was taken from the room for diabetes testing.
The banding was not done until she got in her room at 2 a.m., hours later, she said.
There is dispute about her story. Melissa Conley, a sister-in-law of the presumed father, Carlton Conley, told the Daily Progress, a Charlottesville paper, that she witnessed the baby being banded within minutes of birth, matching the hospital’s claims.
W.T. Robey, a Buena Vista lawyer representing the Rogers family, said there were witnesses who can testify that the bracelets were put on Whitney and her child in the delivery room shortly after birth. Tom Rogers, the grandfather, said he has a videotape that may yet emerge in public someday , but it was not clear at what point the videotape was made.
Lawyers in the case said what really happened that day might never be known, but Robey challenged the suggestion that the switch might have been deliberate. “There’s no motive,” he said.
The families all agree that this is a story of the heart and the eye; that is, a tragic tale that contrasts cold fact and raw emotion, triggering deep, powerful feelings and instincts that are hard to contain.
If their worst fears are confirmed, the grandparents raising Rebecca are prepared to accept DNA’s ultimate verdict and work out an arrangement so Paula Johnson can get to know her real daughter, and so they can get to know Callie.
“We’re not in denial,” said Linda Rogers as she stood in the front yard of a relative’s home. “We haven’t got the testing back yet. There’s still a lot of hope that it could be in paperwork or maybe something else. No, we’re not in denial here. But when it does come to what it has to be, we’ll deal with it. We’ll be glad to extend our family.”
As a mother, Linda Rogers knows about the heart and the eye. She knows that Paula Johnson, if found to be the biological mother, might develop a strong attachment for Rebecca that could complicate someday any finely finessed legal arrangement with the two families.
“Oh, yes, I do understand,” Rogers said. “There has been a fear since Day One that there would be a chance that we could lose Rebecca Grace. That’s why, when Miss Johnson went public and told everybody that she didn’t want to switch, we thanked God right then and there that this woman was the caring and loving person she was. We know that Callie is being taken care of.”
In the view of some legal experts, precedents suggest that the rights of biological parents are superior to those who raise children. Therefore, if Paula Johnson wanted to assert her rights, she might have a good case.
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Michael Irvine, attorney for the Chittums, said any arrangement with Johnson would be designed to create a kind of extended family, with everyone knowing each other and the kids remaining where they are. Such an agreement could be modified later, when the girls grow older, he said.
Upon first seeing a picture of Rebecca, Paula Johnson, who lives in Ruckersville, Va., near Charlottesville, thought “that she was a beautiful child and that she looks like me.” She added that she would do “whatever is best for these two children.”
Her attorney, Cynthia Johnson, said child swapping is out of the question. In Buena Vista, the Chittum and Rogers families agreed.
Paula Johnson lives in a brown A-frame house on the fringe of Ruckersville, a bedroom community near Charlottesville, tucked in the shadow of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Lately, she has been staying elsewhere to avoid the media.
A construction worker, Johnson is raising two older boys and a 16-year-old girl for whom she has custody besides Callie. The volatile relationship between Johnson and Conley helped bring the alleged switch to light. They never married and split up not long after Callie was born.
In the last two years, Johnson has asked for two protective orders against Conley and accused him of assaulting her and brandishing a weapon. Johnson was granted a permit to carry a concealed weapon. She filed a petition for child support in Greene County Juvenile and Domestic Relations Court in January, 1998, trying to increase financial aid from Conley, a step requiring a DNA test.
The results came July 3: Neither one of them was Callie’s parent.
Conley appeared at the news conference with Johnson last week and said he wanted to be part of the arrangement that will be worked out if the DNA tests show that Rebecca and Callie were in fact switched at birth.
Last week, the Rogers and Chittum families decided to allow genetic testing of Rebecca, a process that could take as long as five weeks. This did not require the exhumation of Kevin and Whitney, who are buried on a hillside cemetery side by side with four others killed in the crash July 4.
The state had genetic samples from the accident, which took seven lives, including Kevin’s 13-year-old sister, a niece, two friends and the truck driver. With his car full of people, Kevin Chittum was headed for a fireworks display in nearby Salem when the crash occurred in a rainstorm.
Family members praised Linda Rogers’ 25-year-old son, Travis Rogers, for helping them to entertain the possibility that Rebecca might not be their own. Theresa Chittum, Linda’s niece and no relation to Kevin, said that Travis referred to the pictures of the two children and told them: “Look at it with your eyes, not your heart.”
Theresa added, “Our heart is always going to say, `Becca, Becca, Becca.’ “
The Rogers family is angry with Rebecca’s great-aunt, Mary Watts, sister to Rosie Chittum, Kevin’s mother, for her outspokenness and what they say are misrepresentations. Watts said the family is upset with her because she led an inquiring newspaper reporter to Rebecca, but insisted she’s not at fault.
She was quoted as saying the Chittums and Rogers are quarreling over custody of Rebecca–a statement hotly disputed by Linda Rogers.
“There’s no doubt in my mind that Rebecca belongs to Paula,” Watts said. “She looks like Paula. Her (Paula’s) little girl looks like Kevin. She resembles her little sister (Lindsey Chittum, now 18 months old).”
Theresa Chittum said no one should pay attention to such talk, arguing that the eye, too, can deceive. Rebecca resembles Kevin, she said, and has the curly hair of the Rogers’ family. Tom Rogers, 47, one of Rebecca’s grandfathers who has remarried, agreed. “When my hair grows out, it gets curly, too,” he said.
Rev. Joseph “Butch” Grow, pastor of a non-denominational church and a friend of both the Rogers and Chittum families, said not long after the news became public, Linda Rogers stopped her car and beckoned him over to talk.
“I can’t bring Whitney back,” he quoted her as saying. “But I don’t want them to take my granddaughter. No one can let this happen. I don’t believe it was possible.”
Irvine and Robey are content to let the investigation go forth but are not confident it will uncover what happened.
Tiffany Tucker, 24, of Orange County, Va., said that when she gave birth at the hospital July 3, they put a band around her son’s foot and wrist and one around her wrist.
“They didn’t take him out of the room until they did it,” Tucker said. “Then they check the numbers before they give you the baby to make sure they match.”
Amid the families’ public pain, the media descended upon tiny Buena Vista. Some television hosts sent flowers and gifts to the families, perhaps, they suspect, in hopes of an interview.
Barbara Walters called the two attorneys, and Dan Rather has made calls. As for some of the tabloid shows seeking a story, Theresa Chittum said, “No, that’s too tacky.”
But life slowly returns to normal. Townsfolk visit the grave on the hillside each day. Laura left a poem on Whitney’s grave that took a month to write.
Grow teased with Linda Rogers about how this could be made into a television movie. And in a sign that healing was on the way, Rogers joked that Delta Burke could play her part.
“No,” a family member told Linda, “you talk too much.”
But the family leaves no doubt about its feelings about Rebecca. “No matter what, she’s ours,” said grandfather Tom Rogers, known as Paw-Paw to Rebecca. “No matter which way it goes, she’s ours.”