DNA testing confirmed that David Tait and Leon Swanson were swapped in the government-run Norway House Hospital in 1975 in the western Canadian province of Manitoba. Tait’s biological mother ended up raising Swanson, and Swanson’s birth mother raised Tait.
“I want answers so bad,” Tait said, choking back tears at a press conference in Winnipeg on Friday. He added that he felt “distraught, confused (and) angry.”
This switch comes on the heels of another switch in the same town in November, 2015, when it was discovered that Norman Barkman and Luke Monias who were born in June 1975 had been switched at birth. People had always pointed out to them that they physically resembled the members of the other’s family, but only after they did a DNA test was it proved true.
Norway House is made up of two northern Manitoba communities and is accessible by airplane and a long indirect road linking it with Winnipeg, about 500 miles to the south.
The Manitoba government is asking for a federal investigation into how the four men could have been switched at birth in a federally run hospital.
Practices to ensure the identities of newborns have improved since the 1970s, and Norway House Hospital now fits infants with identification bands, the health department said in a statement.