Foundling embraces her newly discovered family

Colleen Cason
Special to The Star


Detective Ida Spellman predicted Brenda Perry would never solve the great mystery of her life.

David Fisher embraces his half-sister Brenda Perry moments after they meet for the first time last week. Fisher and Perry were abandoned in The Avenue area of Ventura a year apart in the early 1960s. Adopted by different families, they have been searching for their birth family for decades before DNA linked them.

The legendary Ventura Police Department sleuth knew the reed-thin odds of finding answers in the cases she called Abandoned Baby 101. 

On a February night in 1963, Perry was dropped on a doorstep on West Warner Street, off Ventura Avenue. The 5-pound newborn was wrapped in a man’s undershorts with a bloody pillowcase for a diaper. There was no note.

Since she was 18 years old, Perry searched for her birth family, driven by a question she asked most days as she gazed into the mirror: “Who do I look like?” 

Last week, that question was answered as she hugged for the first time in her 54 years three blood relatives, including her half-brother David Fisher who their mother also abandoned not far from where she left Perry a year earlier. 

Through perseverance, clues lurking in old newspaper clippings and police reports, social media posts and spit-in-the-tube DNA technology, Perry beat the odds to discover she is the daughter of the late Joyce Evans, then a secretary at Naval Base Ventura County, and a married man with whom she most likely had a brief fling. The genetics tests show Fisher and Perry have different dads. In all, she gained nine half-siblings.

Foundling Brenda Perry, center, meets her half-niece Stefani Evans and her half-brother Steve Evans for the first time last week after she spent years searching for her birth mother.

Another newfound half-brother, Steve Evans, had a hard time wrapping his head around it. It pained the bearded retired Ventura city worker to think his late mother would abandon not one but two children. He suggested his late aunt Diane might be the mother.

“My mom wasn’t like that,” he told Perry, his voice choked with emotion. 

His daughter Stefani, Perry’s newfound niece, listened patiently to her father’s theory and gently told him the DNA is the proof – besides, Diane had two children at the same time as Joyce was giving birth to Perry and Fisher. It would have been impossible for her to carry all four to term in that time frame.

Brenda Perry, and her newfound half-brothers Steve Evans, center, and David Fisher catch up on family history. Perry and Fisher were abandoned by their mother, while Steve and three older siblings were raised by her.

Through the “I Grew Up in Ventura” Facebook page, Perry found Stefani. Almost from the first, the gregarious call-center lead dispatcher was open to the possibility her late grandma was Perry’s mom. 

She felt it in her gut but seeing a photo of Perry as a child sealed the deal. She was the spitting image of another relation. Stefani agreed to take a genetics test. 

Steve, who would have been 7 years old when Perry was born, never realized his heavy-set mother was pregnant. He never heard a sound that indicated she suffered through a difficult home birth. He could not account for the whereabouts of the baby who probably stayed four or five days in the Evans home. He was unaware of Spellman and other officers canvassing the neighborhood looking for the infant’s mother. 

“I can’t imagine holding that secret. She took it to her grave,” Steve said.

Perry told him she holds no hard feelings. Her birth mother was a single mom with four other children. Her options were few. 

“Besides, I was adopted by a fantastic family,” Perry said of the late Dotty and George Perry.

Steve accepted that and replied with a sly smile, “When I get to heaven, I have questions I am going to ask my mother, and I’ll be wanting answers.”

To the question, “What most compels human behavior — nature or nurture?” nature clearly holds the edge. 

Steve Evans — with his wife, Laura, and daughter Stefani —gets emotional looking at a family photo he had never seen. His new half-sister Brenda Perry found it as part of her research to find her family.

The kinfolk discovered they were drawn to the same movies and books. Certain family members have an abiding love of biscuits; others, a propensity to chain-smoke. Poor vision afflicts the clan. Perry and Fisher both were drawn to careers in health care. 
And like Perry, Fisher also looked in the mirror and asked the question: “Who do I look like?”

As I left the family bonding over their shared quirks, I asked Perry what she was feeling as she looked across the table at David with whom she had shared the same mystery. 

“At peace. Just at peace,” she said.

Perry has given new meaning to a class reunion. Her persistence through 36 years of dead ends and disappointments puts her detective work in a class all its own. 

Email Colleen Cason at casonpoint101@gmail.com. 

Colleen Cason