After 38 Years, a Mother Is Reunited With Her Son

When Virgie Byrns lapsed into a coma after a traffic accident in 1952, she was married and the mother of four children. When she awoke three months later, she found that she was no longer married and that her children had disappeared.

For more than 30 years, she worked to track down her three oldest children. By 1987, she had found them. But her fourth child, whom she named Wayne Albert Bryan, was nothing more than a vague shadow in her impaired memory.

On Thursday, after 38 years, Byrns was reunited with her “forgotten” son--now named James Robert Cottam--in an emotional scene in the front yard of her cluttered Santa Ana home.

“Oh God, I never thought I’d see you again,” Byrns, 70, cried as she tightly embraced Cottam, now 39. “Oh, thank you, Jesus! Thank you, Jesus!”

Although Byrns last saw Cottam in diapers, she said she immediately recognized the heavyset, gray-bearded man with a wife and 8-year-old son in tow as her long-lost child. “You sure do look like your daddy,” Byrns told Cottam, whom she continues to refer to as Wayne.

For Cottam, the reunion capped a whirlwind 12-hour period that brought back his lost past with dizzying urgency. For Byrns, the reunion was the final chapter in a bizarre odyssey that spanned nearly four decades.

The tale started in 1952 when Byrns, then a diesel-truck driver transporting fertilizer, was critically injured in a wreck outside of San Diego. She lapsed into a three-month coma that resulted in severe memory loss, she said.

When she emerged from unconsciousness, hospital workers told her that her husband, Albert Bryan--he died in 1964--had filed for divorce. But even more shocking was news that the father and the state legal system, believing that Byrns would not survive, placed her three oldest children in foster care. Byrns said that while she remembered her two daughters and older son, her memory loss caused her to forget that she had given birth to a fourth child.

In 1954, at age 3, Wayne Albert Bryan was adopted by Robert L. Cottam, a San Diego County elementary school principal, and renamed James Robert Cottam. Although he knew he was adopted, Cottam said he had no knowledge of his natural parents.

“I was born near San Diego, in a Navy town, so I assumed I was a war baby,” said Cottam, a plumber and mechanic from Grass Valley near San Jacinto in Riverside County, referring to the Korean War. “I had a good home--I have no complaints about that.”

Meanwhile, Byrns set out to find her three oldest children, Joycelene, Dolly and Alfred. But under strict state guidelines of the time, adoption information was sealed and Byrns was unable to determine the whereabouts of her children.

After a while she gave up, remarried, and gave birth to two more children.

When the laws changed in 1984 to allow release of some information on adopted children--albeit not their identities--Byrns was able to track down her three lost children. But Cottam remained a mystery.

Last year, Byrns turned to Lori Carangelo, who runs “an adoptive civil liberties organization” from her Palm Desert home, for help. Carangelo eventually succeeded in tracking down Cottam.

At 11 p.m. Wednesday night, Carangelo phoned Cottam’s adoptive father, who delivered the news to Cottam. “He was telling me, ‘You have brothers and sisters and your mom is looking for you,’ ” Cottam said.