Reclaiming a family he never knew he had
DNA service leads adopted Pawcatuck man to relatives
Stonington — A day before Thanksgiving, Leo Chomen’s daughter Amanda met him at the Phoenix airport near where she lived, and as they loaded the car with luggage he noticed a catch in her voice.
“Dad, I’ve got to tell you something,” she said.
Chomen’s mind whirred with the possibilities. Was she pregnant? Were there health issues?
“Dad, buckle your seat belt,” she said. “You have a brother, and he lives in Japan.”
Chomen, a real estate agent in the region now working for Randall Realtors, was still absorbing the news when his daughter explained that she had done a DNA test through 23andMe. The test indicated she was related to Vance Cotier, and that he was Chomen’s biological brother.
Chomen had been adopted as a baby but was told little about his birth family. In fact, he didn’t learn he was adopted until age 13, and the information came from someone else, not his adoptive parents.
Since then, he’d not thought much about the circumstances of his birth. Instead, he’d kept himself busy hustling for a living: working in bakeries, pumping gas — whatever it took to survive.
And he’d done well. Growing up in Bronx, N.Y., without the benefit of even a high school degree, he’d worked his way from a retail security job to, at age 25, a district manager for loss prevention and then, two years later, to regional director covering dozens of stores.
“I had the hunger to do good,” he said. “If you couldn’t make it on skill, you gotta make it on drive.”
Chomen had drive to burn. In addition to careers in loss prevention and real estate, which consistently has seen him among the top 5% of agents in local sales, he also has a boating captain’s license so he can engage in one of his passions: offshore fishing.
At age 59 and now living in Pawcatuck, he shows no signs of slowing down. But the idea that he might have a family out there somewhere intrigued him, and there was always the possibility of discovering something about his family’s health history.
So, the old salt decided to go fishing for family.
“The whole thing was mind-blowing. I don’t have enough Christmas cards.”
LEO CHOMEN ON DISCOVERING HIS BIOLOGICAL FAMILY
He contacted Vance on Facebook with this message: “I believe you're my brother.” He explained the DNA test and the positive match.
Vance, after realizing it wasn't a hoax, had news for Chomen, too. “You also have another brother and three sisters,” he replied.
But there was more. Chomen's biological father had died, but his mother was still alive, though suffering from Alzheimer's disease. And he had a stepfather, Robert Falzone, a retired Long Island fire chief.
Turns out that Chomen was born at a bad time in his mother's life. She had her first-born, Debbie, in 1958 by her first husband, whose last name was Cameron. Before Chomen arrived in the world two years later, she had divorced and later remarried a man named Richard Cotier.
Chomen, who for years thought he was a Cameron, said he believes his mom didn't want anyone to know about her pregnancy — which was either by her first husband or her second — so Chomen was quietly put up for adoption. He uses his adoptive family's last name, though genetically he now knows he is a Cotier.
Two years after Chomen's birth, in 1962, the Cotiers had Vance, and then twin daughters Yvonne and Yvette the following year. The Cotiers eventually split up, and Chomen's mom later married Richard Heuthier, with whom she had another child.
It didn't take long for Vance Cotier to see the resemblance between him and Chomen once pictures were exchanged.
Vance realized they looked almost like twins. He immediately put out word to other family members, all of whom were already connected.
“Guess what, we have a brother,” he told them.
Still, one was skeptical: eldest sister Debbie, now living in southwest Florida.
As Debbie stewed over the impossibility of it all, Chomen was making up for lost time, contacting as many family members as he could. He eventually found dozens of relatives, including a niece in North Branford.
“The whole thing was mind-blowing,” he said. “I don't have enough Christmas cards.”
Chomen said the interesting thing about his family discovery is that it opened the eyes of others to the importance of kinship. A lot of the family members hadn't talked to each other in a while — some because of political differences — so the new family member has helped to reconnect some of those who had drifted apart.
He helped arrange a meeting the weekend of Feb. 14 in Florida that brought a big group of family members together with him for the first time, including Vance and wife Noemi, his stepfather, several nieces and even half-sister Debbie, who finally had accepted him.
During the visit, he twice went with his family to see his mom in an Ocala, Fla., nursing home, though she doesn't recognize anyone.
The meeting went smoothly, according to Chomen, who said the get-together included a party on Valentine's Day and a fabulous dinner. Another
family reunion is being planned for the summer in Long Island, he added.
“It was weird,” he said. “It was almost as if we knew each other . ... There was a lot of hugging going on and some crying, too.”
Chomen marvels at how well they have all done, despite growing up in a family with little money. Vance, for one, had a career in the Navy and now works for Lockheed Martin; Yvonne is married to a child therapist, and a niece, married to a surgeon, works as a veterinarian.
“Somehow it seems there's this gene that causes us to land,” Chomen said. “Somehow or another, you pull out of it.”
He said he harbors no malice toward his mother or anyone else for the nearly six decades of separation from his family.
“At the time she made that decision, she was very young,” he said.
Getting together with family members has allowed them to trade stories. Chomen found out, for instance, that his mother spent a long stretch as a young child in a sanitorium and was once told she would likely never be able to have babies. Another piece of family lore had his mother nearly kidnapped on a train as a child.
Chomen, who has two children himself, has vowed to do his best to make sure the family is never separated again — by politics, or anything else.
“We need to stay together because we all need each other,” he said. “If any of them need something, I'm going to be there.”