Kyle Bylin and Jeremy Morrison were the only two babies born at Unity Medical Center in Grafton, North Dakota, on January 26, 1988. Their families took them home, raised them, and never questioned what happened in that delivery ward. More than 36 years later, a DNA test revealed what the families now say was a catastrophic mistake: the hospital sent each boy home with the wrong parents.
Both families have filed a lawsuit against Christian Unity Hospital Corporation, which operates as Unity Medical Center, seeking more than $50,000 in damages and a jury trial. The hospital denies wrongdoing, has moved to dismiss the case with prejudice, and says the records that might answer the central question, how two newborns ended up in the wrong families, no longer exist.
Morrison, who now lives in Colorado, told KKTV that he spent his entire childhood sensing something was off. He was the blonde-haired outlier in a family of brunettes.
"I didn't have anyone that looked like me in my family. I was that blonde-haired kid that stood out in a family full of brown-haired people."
Roughly two years ago, Morrison took a DNA test. The results confirmed what decades of family photos had hinted at: the parents who raised him were not his biological parents. His aunt then provided a DNA sample, and the match came back pointing to Bylin, not Morrison, as her biological nephew.
The implication was stark. If Bylin belonged biologically to Morrison's family, and Morrison did not, then the two boys, born on the same day in the same small-town hospital, had been swapped.
Unity Medical Center has not conceded anything. In its response, the hospital told the court that its staff "possessed and exercised the appropriate degree of skill and learning" and "at all times used reasonable care, judgment, and diligence." Hospital attorneys also raised the statute of limitations, arguing that the sheer length of time between the alleged incident and the filing of the lawsuit should bar the claims entirely.
The hospital went further, invoking a comparative fault defense, suggesting that if any damages occurred, they could be attributable to parties other than the hospital. Which parties those might be, the filing does not specify.
In a separate statement provided to KKTV, Unity Medical Center struck a more sympathetic tone. The hospital said it was "currently working to better understand a highly unusual situation involving two men who apparently were separated from their biological parents at some point during their lives."
"Both men were born at our hospital on the same day in 1988, and we recognize the profound impact this discovery has had on them and their families."
But the statement also delivered a blunt bottom line: the medical and staffing records from that era "no longer exist," no members of the 1988 delivery team still work at the hospital, and the institution has "found no evidence to support claims that Unity Medical Center or its staff were responsible for what occurred."
Morrison's comments to KKTV carry a weight that legal filings cannot fully capture. He described not just a misplaced identity but an entirely redirected life.
"I know I definitely wouldn't be here in Colorado today if I went home with the right parents. I would have been working the farm with my older brother that I never knew I had."
Morrison said he has no cousins, a detail that underscores the isolation of growing up in a family where the biological connection simply was not there. The lawsuit alleges that both men were raised by each other's biological families for more than three decades, each unaware of the other's existence in any meaningful sense.
Both sets of parents have now met their biological sons. But as of the most recent reporting, Bylin and Morrison have not met each other. Two men born on the same day, in the same building, in a town small enough that only two babies arrived that day, and they remain strangers.
The hospital's strongest procedural weapon may be the clock. Nearly four decades have passed since the alleged switch. Hospital attorneys cited "the length of time that has passed between the alleged incident and the service of this lawsuit" as grounds for dismissal.
What the available filings do not address, and what may determine whether this case ever reaches a jury, is whether North Dakota law allows the statute of limitations to be tolled in cases where the harm was not and could not have been discovered until modern DNA testing made it possible. The families did not know. They could not have known. The question is whether the law accounts for that.
Both sides have demanded a jury trial. The plaintiffs want one to prove their case. The hospital wants one, presumably, to defend its record. That alignment suggests neither side expects this to be resolved quietly.
Unity Medical Center says the records are gone. No staffing logs. No delivery-room documentation. No chain-of-custody paperwork for two newborns who left the building in the wrong arms.
For the hospital, that gap is a shield, no paper trail means no proof of negligence. For the families, it is an indictment. A hospital that cannot account for which baby went to which mother has, by definition, failed at one of the most basic duties a birthing facility holds.
The lawsuit does not allege an intentional act. The families describe a mistake. But a mistake of this magnitude, one that rewrote the lives of two children, two sets of parents, and extended families on both sides, is not the kind of error that disappears because the paperwork did.
Key questions hang over this case. No independent investigation, by law enforcement or a state health department, has been reported. The specific DNA testing service Morrison used has not been disclosed. The attorneys on both sides have not been publicly identified in the available reporting. And the precise legal claims in the complaint, beyond the general allegation of negligence, remain unclear.
The court where the lawsuit was filed, its case number, and the exact filing date are also not publicly detailed in current reporting.
The hospital wants this case dismissed with prejudice, meaning gone for good, with no chance to refile. It argues the clock ran out, the records vanished, and no evidence ties its staff to the alleged error.
But two DNA tests say otherwise. Two families say otherwise. And two men who spent 36 years living lives that were never supposed to be theirs say otherwise.
Institutions that lose the records do not get to claim the record was clean. If a North Dakota court agrees, Unity Medical Center may have to answer for January 26, 1988, whether it kept the paperwork or not.
When a hospital cannot tell you which baby belongs to which mother, the statute of limitations is the least of its problems.
