Search for long-lost siblings turns up all but eldest sister
The hole in her heart always felt deeper during the holidays. Other children in the group homes, most of them in foster care, received visits from social workers. They received gifts and clothing. They received attention.
But she was adopted. No social workers came. No gifts came. No family came.
“I was abandoned in those homes for months,” April Jeffas said. “I was alone.”
But she knew somewhere out there she had a family bound to her by blood — a father she never knew, a brother two years her senior named Cody, a brother two years her junior named Tylor.
And Brandie, her big sister and the closest thing she can remember to having a mother who loved her.
“She was the one who brushed my hair and tucked me in at night,” Jeffas said. “She was the one I ran to.”
Brandie was a little girl when their mother, Tonja Ethier, took up with Alton Martin, a former Marine with a mustache who had left behind a wife and three children somewhere out West, possibly in Roswell. He fathered Jeffas’ two brothers, but she later learned he had been in prison when she was conceived.
“But I was told that when he got out of prison he loved and held me as if I was his own child,” she said.
The family, which tottered between Georgia and Florida, struggled to stay together, battered by substance abuse, poverty and infidelities. In 1994, all four children were placed into foster care in Griffin, Ga., after what Jeffas recalls was a bloody night when her mother was hit in the head with a bedpost by a faceless man with a mustache.
Brandie, then 8, ran to a neighbor’s house for help.
Jeffas, then 3, never saw her mother or Martin again. Soon, Brandie was gone, too, sent to live with her father.
In 1998, Jeffas was adopted by a couple who seemed to her to be unable or unwilling to deal with a child already so broken by age 7. She remembers being sent to various treatment facilities and group homes.
“I started not giving a (expletive) because no one gave a (expletive) about me,” she said. “That was the hardest part of life.”
Every day, she thought of Brandie and her brothers and how life was supposed to be.
“Having this hole inside me made me always reach for something,” she said. “I was always reaching for a family.”
At 18, she ran away to New York, where she put herself through school, earned a bachelor’s degree in engineering, and found a job.
And then she found a family, becoming engaged and moving with her fiancé and his two children to a comfortable home on Long Island.
But she wanted to find her blood family. Her mother and Martin had since passed away, her biological father’s identity was unknown, but she hoped her siblings were still out there somewhere. So she started Googling. In 2012 or 2013, she found Tylor. Later, she found Cody. Both had been adopted by a nice family and remained in Georgia. Last year, she brought both to New York for the holidays. It was their first Christmas together, as near as they can recall. The only one missing was Brandie. And then came a day when Jeffas stumbled upon an old post dated Jan. 27, 2010, on a website for those seeking long-lost family members.
“I have been looking for my two brothers and my sister,” the post read. “We got split up in 1994. I was 8.” It was signed Brandie521. Jeffas responded immediately to the post. No answer came. But someone else had responded. Christi Martin’s father had left them when she and her brother and sister were young. She had tracked down her father, and when she was 16 she went to stay with him, his new woman and their four children in Georgia.
Her father was Alton Martin.
Christi, who wrote me from Roswell, said she took care of the kids for a few months but was forced to return home when her mother found out she had not been enrolled in school.
She learned later that the children had been placed in foster care and were up for adoption.
“I wanted them,” she said. “I was 19 then, true, but I had a small twobedroom house of my own.”
The state of Georgia said no and refused to release information on where the children had been placed.
“It broke my heart,” she said. “Because all it made in the end was victims. We could have had each other.”
Her sister is Jennifer Martin, whom some of you will remember from a July 6 column about how she found a tarnished deputy badge her father, Alton Martin, had given her when she was a child and he was out of prison. The star had been given to him in gratitude by a Penitentiary of New Mexico corrections officer for protecting him during the bloody prison riots in 1980.
Jennifer had contacted me because she wanted to find the officer’s family to return the star. After the column was published, she was able to do so.
Jeffas had read that column and contacted me.
Maybe, she said, if the officer’s family could be found, perhaps the rest of her family could be found, too.
And maybe, come this Christmas, that hole in her heart won’t seem so deep.