Show A chance encounter brought Kari Maracic face-to-fawith the JT ce brother she'd spent years trying to track down henexacily BY DAVID OLIVER RELIN docs the border between coincidence and fate begin to blur? For Kari Maracic and Ben Davis die answer is Aug 1 1 2002 That evening over dinner at a Medi- terranean restaurant in San Francisco Kari and Ben discovered that the stranger sharing a meal on the other side of the table was actually a long-lo- st sibling “In a country of nearly 300 million people the chances of that happening are well none” Ben says! “If someone else told me this story I definitely wouldn't believe it!” But Kari isn't as Top: Ban at 3 H never knew he had biological inter "But" ' he tayi "I fob part of me was missing" Right Kari at 2 She was not told ho had a brother until she was 1 7 startled by the reunion as her broth- - j er “As strange as it may sound I always knew I would find him” she says “I never stopped believing” Ben and Kari’s unlikely path apart and together1 began in Miami when their moth- Fox was 16 and pregnant Her boyfriend Chris Maracic was only 18 Judging that they weren't ready to raise a child Ben’s parents made die agonizing t er 11a decision to give him up for adoption Six years later after Chris had served in Vietnam and returned they married had Kari and then divorced when she was only 3 Kari was raised by her mother and by her married Da when Kari was 11 From the day at age 17 when Kari learned that she had a brother— somewhere —she began to obsess about tracking him down “I grew np in Miami where everyone is tan” Kari says “I was this pale dark-hairgirl who always felt like an outsider I thought ‘Somewhere out there is this person whose brain works like mine who might make sense of me’ ” When she turned 21 Kari persuaded her grandmother to lend her $500 so she could pay for an international locator service Meanwhile her mother —who never had been able to get giving up Ben out of her mind — hired a private detective But with adoption records in Florida sealed by law finding a needle named Ben in die vast American haystack proved ed impossible Meanwhile Ben grew happily in North Carolina part of a loving family “I had awesome parents who told me I was adopted Up from the get-gBen says “1 never felt abandoned My parents always stressed how hard they had to fight to get me” Even so he reflects “1 always marched to my own drummer and felt like I was out of step I felt like some part of me was missing” When Ben was in his 20s he tried to find his birth parents “It wasn't that I was unhappy with my family” he says “It was more that being a scientific o” Mfll a SPML ts 9003 PJUUDI MAOISM |