This Man Found A Picture Of Himself On A Missing Persons List — And It Changed His Whole World

New Jersey man Steve Carter grew up knowing very little about his real past. He knew he had been adopted as an infant in Hawaii and was raised in a well-heeled part of the Garden State. But Steve remained curious about his life before that... so one day he decided to do some digging online. When his investigations unearthed an artist’s impression of a missing person, though, Steve knew his entire world was about to change.

Life turned upside down

Up until that point, Steve only knew the following things about his upbringing. Back in 1980, Steve Carter Sr. was a U.S. Army officer stationed on the island of Oahu, Hawaii. Then he and his teacher wife, Pat, decided to adopt a child. And when they encountered a three-and-a-half-year-old boy living in foster care, they knew that they just had to bring him home. “It was love at first sight,” Pat explained to People in 2012.

Bio-parents are out of the picture

On September 23, 1980, Steve and Pat brought the boy home to live with them full time. According to Hawaii records, the little guy’s name was Tenzin Amea, and he had been in the state’s care for the past three years. His file stated that the fair-haired infant’s anonymous father was a native Hawaiian. The boy’s mother was down as Jane Amea, and she had been arrested when Tenzin was just five months old.

A new life

Now, however, it seemed as if the little boy’s luck had changed. Renamed William Steven Tenzin Carter — but known as Steve Jr. — the boy began a new life with the Carters in a wealthy area of southern New Jersey. Throughout the 1980s and ’90s, he enjoyed a happy and normal childhood, playing sports and enjoying parties with the neighborhood kids.

A mysterious past

As an adult, though, Steve began to wonder just who his birth parents might have been. By now, his purported Hawaiian heritage had become something of a family joke. “With his blonde hair, blue eyes, and light complexion,” Steve Sr. told South Jersey Local News, “[He] does not strike one as being of Polynesian extraction.”