Michelle Ricica will have access to her original birth and adoption records beginning March 20, though the 26-year-old already knows what’s there. A quirky happenstance led her to her birth mother when she was a high school senior — all due to a name etched in her mind for years.
“In the second grade, I realized other kids weren’t adopted,” said Michelle, who was born in Dayton and now lives in Cincinnati. “I thought everyone was.”
When Michelle got older, her adoptive parents showed her a story they’d clipped from the Dayton Daily News right before she turned 2. Her adoptive parents, Dan and Lois Ricica, sensed that Dayton’s first baby born in 1991, Keshia Clark, might be Michelle’s sibling. Thebirth parents’ first names and ages listed in the article seemed to be a good match.
“My adoptive parents were able to kind of detect that it could possibly be my biological family, but they didn’t know,” Michelle said. “I always kept that article with me. I copied it every year and put in in the front of my school planner.”
In September 2006, a name jumped out at her on a report in the Beavercreek High School attendance office where Michelle assisted during the school day.
“I freaked out and asked the ladies in the office to look up the birth date of Keshia Clark and it was Jan. 1, 1991,” Michelle said. “It was definitely the baby in the article.”
At first Keshia didn’t believe the perplexing Myspace message from a senior at her high school claiming to be her sister.
“I thought there was no way. This girl is crazy,” she said. “She knew a lot of information about my mom — like way too much for her to be some random girl.”
“I called my mom to confront her about the whole story and she just instantly started crying,” said Keshia, now 24 and living in Dayton. “Then I knew it was real.”
Keshia’s mother, Tina Jackson, summoned her daughter to her Belmont home and said she had something to tell her and her older brother Jack. Jackson could barely get the words out. There was a middle child — a girl — that she gave up for adoption.
“I couldn’t even talk straight. I didn’t know what to say, what to do,” Jackson said. “I waited for this for so long yet I wasn’t prepared for it.”
Long hard road
Jackson said life with the children’s father was turbulent and repressive. She was a virtual prisoner in the home, she said, not allowed to work and rarely allowed outside or to drive.
“I was in a very abusive relationship with their father. I had Jack and he had been through so much with his father beating me,” Jackson said. “Why would I bring another child into this environment when he doesn’t pay attention to his first son’s life? And he doesn’t pay attention to me — all he does is beat me. I could give them a better life.”
“’Big Jack’ was so far out there that he didn’t even realize I was pregnant, and I lived with him,” Jackson said.
Big Jack is Jack Lee Clark, the once-notorious leader of the 7 D’s, a violent East Dayton drug gang. Jackson said he went to jail on Keshia’s first birthday. Then, in 2005, he was sentenced to 40 years in federal prison for various offenses, including money laundering, weapons charges and conspiracy to distribute cocaine.
Jackson had troubles of her own with drugs.
“I followed a long, hard road there for a while. So it was rough on my children who were in the home already,” she said. “I battled that for some time.”
Within a week of the Myspace message, Michelle met with Keshia, her brother Jack and Jackson, her birth mother.
“I was terrified the night before. I couldn’t sleep,” said Michelle. “All these things were going through my head, like what if, what if, what if? I had no idea what to expect. But we all got really, really close and it was kind of like I was always there in a way.”
Surprising twist
At first, Jackson didn’t let on there was more to the story.
An aunt tipped off Michelle and Keshia that Michelle wasn’t the only child Jackson placed for adoption. After Jack Jr. was born and before Jackson got pregnant with Michelle, she gave birth to another daughter.
Michelle set out to find her.
Turns out Ashley Sheline, the sister Michelle never knew, also was looking to reunite with her biological family.
Ashley, who grew up in Vandalia, was attending Ohio State University when she was contacted by Michelle, who found her through an online registry.
Ashley, now 28, said she signed up for every adoption registry she could find, hoping to locate her birth mother.
Like Keshia, Ashley thought the “biological sister” who contacted her must have been mistaken. It was at the Mall at Fairfield Commons where the three sisters — Ashley, Keshia and Michelle — met for the first time.
The young women compared notes and noses — even the gaps in their teeth — and concluded there was no mistaking the resemblance.
“Everybody says we laugh the same, we think the same things are funny; we just have the same type of personality,” Ashley said.
They rarely speak of their birth father. Michelle and Ashley visited him in a West Virginia prison, but “didn’t react very well” and have had no contact with him since, according to Jackson. She ended her relationship with the father of her four children, who she never married, years earlier.
“He’s pretty much been in prison my whole life,” Keshia said.
‘It was all worth it in the end’
Keshia Clark did not have an ideal childhood. She lived with other family members while Jackson, who spent time in jail and rehab, was unable to care for her. She missed a lot of school, the very reason her name appeared on the non-attendance list spotted by Michelle that September day in 2006.
As rough as times were for her, she suspects they would have been worse with two more children in the home.
“I always wonder if they were around if it would have just been rougher,” she said.
“Now I love having sisters. Honestly, I feel like they were in my life forever. I don’t even look at it like they just came into my life seven-eight years ago.”
Jackson, who lives with her husband in Jamestown, regrets missing Ashley and Michelle’s childhood, but believes she made the right decision.
“To see their lives and their smiles today, it was all worth it in the end,” she said. “Because they would have lived a harder life, a much harder life.”
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