A former Miss Nevada who was abandoned at an airport as a newborn over 40 years ago is about to meet her mom for the first time.
Elizabeth Hunterton, 44, was only about ten days old when she was found by two pilots at a Nevada airport on January 17 of 1980; according to her, there are only four babies who have ever been abandoned at a US airport.
As the date to meet her mom for the first time approaches — the two first connected in 2020, but didn't talk over the phone until January of 2023, and communication between them often lapsed –– she has taken to TikTok to unpack her journey, and explain why her case was nearly "impossible" to solve.
In one of the videos detailing her case, Elizabeth explained that "investigators called my case the perfect abandonment" for a variety of reasons, including that she was abandoned at an airport, "so I could have literally been from anywhere," plus: "I was clearly mixed race. What am I mixed with? It was anyone's guess."
And maybe the trickiest reason of all: the date she was found. Though she said "it doesn't seem like a big deal," she explained: "Most medical record are divided by decade, so in order to find that four week window where I was born, they would have had to have pulled all of the records from the 1970s and all of the records from the 1980s, and that's only in the case that I was born in a hospital, which investigators didn't think I was, because there's no record of me."
She noted: "So basically what investigators were trying to figure out was, did anybody, of any race, anywhere in the world have a baby sometime at the end of 1979 [or] the beginning of 1980, and leave her at the airport?"
Elizabeth further explained that because all of the known paperwork attached to her identity was done under Jane Doe, even decades later, she still didn't have any "useful information" for investigators to figure out who her biological parents were. Still, in 2020, she launched an official search with the help of companies such as Ancestry and 23AndMe, and after pouring over long lost relatives, making extensive family trees, obituaries, and more over the course of almost a year, she finally found her mom (she had found her father in 2018, however he passed away in 2018).
MORE: Nashville chef Joey Fecci, 26, dies after being found 'unresponsive' while running half-marathon
With the help of a second cousin, she narrowed down the possibility of who her mom might be to two sisters, one of them a labor and delivery nurse who matched the description in a witness report from the airport where Elizabeth was found. She eventually reached out to her, her aunt, through a letter, and a few days later, her daughter texted her.
It wasn't long after that her birth mother, Emily, over email revealed the truth to her: not the reason that she didn't keep her –– which was a lack of financial and mental stability –– but rather why the airport; she'd given her newborn to a friend who promised to take her, Elizabeth, to an adoption agency, but she instead left her at the airport, and didn't tell Emily that's what she did until almost a year after the fact.
Now, with only days left until she finally meets her birth mother in person, Elizabeth has revealed to People that they plan to do so "in a neutral territory."
Speaking of her relatives, she said: "They rented a house, so that way, if either of us just needs space, if we need to go for a walk or we need to just go someplace and not be around people, we can do that."
"I got a lot of feelings happening," she also said in a TikTok as she began to recount her journey in the lead up to the reunion. "Probably the overarching one is fear — I'm freaking scared –– of what, who knows. But I think the best way for me to understand what I'm feeling and why is to unpack the biological mother search again." Her videos have since garnered close to five million views.