Stolen at 9 Months, Reunited 35 Years Later on Valentine's Day

Kyle Adler grew up in an affluent Chicago suburb with a loving family. He had no reason to question where he came from - until a DNA test upended everything he thought he knew.

A Name He Never Knew

Adler, a gym owner in Denver, Colorado, was born Marcos Antonio Navarrete in 1990 in Coronel, a coastal city in Chile. His mother, Ana Maria Navarrete, was 19 years old and working night shifts at a fish shop. When Adler was 9 months old, a caregiver told her that an American couple had taken the infant after a local priest made arrangements. She was given no say. She spent the next 35 years not knowing if her son was alive.

The Search

Adler began searching for answers in 2017, aided by the Chilean nonprofit Nos Buscamos and later by Tyler Graf, founder of Connecting Roots - a man who had been taken from Chile the same way and had since reunited with his own birth mother. In 2025, a DNA test through MyHeritage confirmed the match. His birth mother was real. She had never stopped looking for him.

A police investigator told Navarrete the case was likely part of what authorities described as a wide-reaching counterfeit adoption network involving adoption agencies, immigration officials, judges, nurses, and doctors. Government estimates suggest more than 20,000 children were taken from families during the 1973-1990 military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet. No one has been prosecuted. Navarrete is now working with a law firm seeking criminal sentences for those responsible.

Valentine's Day, Both in White

On February 14, 2026, Adler landed in Santiago. As he walked out of the international arrivals gate, Ana Maria Navarrete ran to him. Both wore white. He bent over and buried his face in her hair. She sobbed apologies. He told her she had nothing to apologize for. "She felt she had failed me as a mom," Adler said later. "She had done the opposite. She had fought for me. She had never stopped looking for me."

A Week Together

The two spent a week retracing his earliest days - the beach in Coronel, the hospital where he was born, and the house where he was taken from. They recovered a copy of his original birth certificate, and Adler met one of his four siblings. He says his adoptive parents, Mike and Connie Adler, did not know the circumstances of his adoption. "My parents didn't steal me," he said. Navarrete had one sentence when he walked through the door: "I'm so happy to be finally meeting him. My dream has finally come true."