Patrick Connaro, a
42-year-old robotics engineer living in Colorado Springs, was sitting in the bleachers
one warm Saturday afternoon in 2003, watching his son’
s Little League game, when the ground opened beneath him.
“My little boy was there, he was up at bat, and I started yelling for him, ‘Go
Matthew! Knock it out of the park!’ And another man started screaming for
Matthew. Louder than me. I looked over, and I looked at him, and I was
like, Who is this guy? And I looked at my son, and I looked at him … and they were identical.”
After the ball game, Connaro ordered a paternity test. The results came back 2 weeks later. “I opened up the letter from Labcorp, and it said, ‘ … 99.9 percent chance you are not the biological
father of this
child.’ I started crying. My
head started spinning.”
Connaro admits that the possibility had crossed his mind before, given his son’s dissimilar facial features, but each
time he questioned his wife about it, she vehemently denied the suggestion. Even when he showed her the test results, she still denied it. “She said, ‘You forged this,’ ” Connaro recalls, shaking his
head in amazement.
Some call this paternity fraud. But a more accurate term is "paternal discrepancy." Paternity fraud emphasizes the financial aspect of the phenomenon, but paternal discrepancy (PD) describes the anomaly itself--the disconnect between what
men think is true and the genetic reality. And research shows that it's a lot more common than we might believe.
