Two families mistakenly switched babies at birth and raised them as their own for 4 years.

The story involves two families, one from Santo Tomás, Atlántico, and the other from Chimichangua, Cesar, and began in 2015.

That year, José Gregorio Hernández, a 31-year-old businessman, learned that he would have a daughter out of wedlock, in addition to the three little ones he already had with his wife. The girl was finally born on March 21, 2016, in Barranquilla. Although he celebrated the birth, he felt that something was wrong.

“They let me know the day of the birth, but I couldn’t attend because of work issues. I was very excited about the news, and at first everything was fine. We registered her under my name, and everything seemed normal,” said Hernández in a conversation with Infobae.

The first signs he noticed that she might not be his biological daughter was a difference in her feet, as she wasn’t like the rest of his girls, who had a very characteristic feature. As she grew up, he noticed that she didn’t look like him, nor the mother, nor other relatives.

The idea that she wasn’t his daughter continued to grow and he decided to confront the situation. He told the mother that he’d go shoe shopping with her and instead went to a laboratory to have a DNA test done.

“When I got the results that the girl was incompatible with me, I thought it was a hoax at first, that they were messing with me,” he said, and went to talk to the mother.

“The second step is to test you with the girl. As they say, he who owes nothing, fears nothing,” he told her, as he told Infobae. However, he didn’t expect the mother to not be compatible either.

“It was like a bucket of cold water had been dumped on me. From then on, all I could think about was where my daughter was,” said José.

From that moment on, he launched an investigation to find his real daughter and, just like a detective, he didn’t give up until the case was solved. The first step was taken at the hospital, where, through an appeal, he requested all the births that had occurred between March 20 and March 22, 2016.

In the documents he received, he learned that on March 21, seven other babies were also born, five of them girls. As part of his research, he focused on a birth that occurred within minutes of Noris. The other mother was Ana Cecilia Cano.

To find Ana Cecilia, he used social media. Fortunately, he found her Facebook profile and when he saw her profile he knew that she was who he’d been looking for. She appeared in the photo with a girl. Upon seeing her, he knew immediately that she was his daughter.

“As soon as I saw the picture, I said, ‘this is my daughter, she looks just like me,’” he said. At that moment, he tried to contact her. It wasn’t easy, but in the end she answered his messages.

“After talking for some time, we agreed to perform a second test with her daughter,” said José. The results confirmed his suspicions: Ana Cecilia’s girl, Saray, was Jose and Noris’s daughter, the one they’d been looking for. Salome was Ana’s biological daughter.

“This has been a real drama,” says José. However, despite the clear evidence, the mothers have refused to exchange the girls, who’ve they’ve already taken care of their entire lives.

“I feel that I’ve lost years of enjoying time with her. When they’re small is when you enjoy your children the most. From the bottom of my heart, I want to have my biological child, but I can’t keep both girls because there’s another family that needs her too. But I do want to have my biological daughter and also keep myself present in the life of the daughter I’ve raised so far,” he said.

“What I want is for those girls to have more love now. They have two mommies and a daddy who will vouch for both of them,” he added. He hopes that, little by little, his biological daughter will accept him as her father.