ELWOOD, Ind. — Central Indiana siblings are now reunited, but it turns out they were never really that far apart.
Mike Jackman says he remembers Karen Warner.
“We weren’t really friends, we just knew each other," said Jackman. “We were acquaintances. We actually went to school together.”
The two hadn’t seen each other since their high school days in Elwood, Indiana but reconnected last fall on Facebook.
“My old classmate friended me, I better talk to her,” Mike said he remembered thinking.
Neither could have known that months later, the connection would end up being much deeper.
“She does a lot of things like me,” Mike said.
There’s a very good reason for that. It goes back 51 years, to a hospital in Anderson, where Mike and Karen were born - on the same day, minutes apart, to the same woman.
That’s right. Mike and Karen are twins.
“It’s been overwhelming, that’s what I told Karen. Overwhelming. I’m still trying to let it sink in,” Mike said.
“When we get together, we talk. We laugh. It’s just unreal,” Karen added.
Unreal is a good word to describe it, kind of like how Mike and Karen found each other.
Both had always known they were adopted, but neither knew the other existed until Indiana unsealed adoption records a few years ago.
That’s when Karen found out her biological mom’s name. But what she also found in those records left her stunned.
She talked to 13News more than year ago about finding out she had a twin brother.
“I seriously started crying. I was like, ‘I have a brother somewhere and I want to find him,’” Karen said in May 2019
She began working with adoption websites for help.
“Everybody kept coming up with nothing because we didn’t have a name to go by or anything,” Karen said.
Then, a search of local voting records listing men with Karen’s birthdate gave her three names. The third on the list was Mike.
“We had just become friends on Facebook,” said Karen.
Karen said she messaged Mike to say he might be her twin brother.
A DNA test later confirmed it.
“I didn’t know I had a sister, let alone a twin sister,” Mike said.
A twin sister who, they discovered, has lived just five blocks down the street for the past three years.
“I had no clue, not a clue,” Karen said.
“It’s filled a void in my life I didn’t know was there,” said Mike. “There was something out there, I didn’t know was there and now it’s here. She’s here.”
The twins now talk almost every day and see each other several times a week.
“We’re two peas in a pod,” said Karen.
Making every second count, they’re catching up on a lot of lost time.