East Bay Woman Abandoned At Birth Reunited With Rescuer 62 Years Later
CONCORD (CBS SF) -- A woman who was abandoned in a car in front of a Concord home as a day-old baby came face to face for the first time this week with the woman who found her.
Kira Derhgawen, now 62, was bundled in a blanket and left inside a parked car in front of a home on Coventry Road on April 29, 1951, just a day after she was born, according to the Contra Costa County Sheriff's Office.
A woman who lived at the home, Jan Hungerford, and her friend, were startled to find the baby inside the backseat of the car and contacted the sheriff's office.
In the days and weeks that followed, investigators attempted to locate the child's parents.
After the story was featured in the local news, someone believed to be Derhgawen's teenage mother wrote to one of the women who found the baby.
"You know the baby you found in your car? Well, I just wanted you to know that the baby is not unwanted...I am the mother of the baby," the letter read. "And by the way her name isn't 'Jane Doe' it is Neldajean."
The woman who received the letter took it to the sheriff's office, which attempted to find the writer by requesting writing samples from high school students throughout the Bay Area, according to sheriff's spokesman Jimmy Lee.
Derhgawen, who had always been aware she was adopted, said she first learned of the letter in 2009 after contacting the adoption agency that facilitated her adoption by a Bay Area couple at two years old.
A local foster family, whom she has been unable to identify, took her in for the first two years of her life but were not allowed to adopt her -- another traumatic event in her young life, she said.
She said that she is still searching for her birth mother, now estimated to be around 78 years old, and said she believes her mother was forced to give her up.
"I would love to get in contact with anyone from either side of my birth family or my foster family," she said.
Though Derhgawen continues to search for her biological mother, she is grateful for her reunion with Hungerford, whom she first contacted in 2009.
Derhgawen, a Washington resident, flew down to meet the 84-year-old in person for the first time this week.
"We reconnected in Oakland on Monday," she said. "We feel like family—there is this heart connection that's there."
In addition to exploring her own complicated past, Derhgawen, who previously worked as an adoption case worker, is dedicated to helping others who have been orphaned, abandoned or adopted make sense of their family history and overcome the loss of their birth parents.
"We have attachments to people who have been in our past and there should be some sort of humane way to support us in our search to have them in our life if we choose to...open those doors," she said.
"I'm total proof that a person can have a happy, wonderful life, but these puzzle pieces—people have a drive to have those answers," she said.
The sheriff's case of the 1951 abandonment remains open.
Anyone with information about the case may contact Jimmy Lee at the sheriff's office at (925) 313-2643.
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