The “Burger King baby” and the biological mom who abandoned her in a grimy fast-food restaurant bathroom 27 years ago have reunited — and have a lot more in common than their shared DNA.
Katheryn Deprill and her mom, Cathy Pochek — who appeared together in public for the first time Thursday on the “Today” show — both work as emergency medical technicians.
They both lived near Allentown, Pa.
They drive the same make and color car and their names are the same, only spelled differently: Katheryn Ann and Catherine Anne.
And, what’s even stranger, the 44-year-old Pochek baby-sat her daughter’s hubby when he was a child.
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“It’s so surreal, I never in a million years thought this was going to happen, so I don’t think I necessarily prepared myself for it,” Deprill, 27, said on the show.
“She actually was the baby sitter of my husband,” Deprill added. “They lived in the same town. So she knew my husband before I did.”
The pair were reunited after Deprill told her story on Facebook last month, and her appeal for information about her birth mother went viral.
“Looking for my birth mother … She abandoned me in the Burger King bathroom only hours old, Allentown PA.
“Please help me find her by sharing my post. Maybe she will see this,” the post read in part.
Pochek did, along with more than 30,000 others.
The mom contacted a lawyer who reached out to Deprill, and the pair agreed to meet privately on March 24.
“It was very exciting, just lots of emotions. And actually, it was kind of awkward,” a tearful Deprill said on the show, where she was joined by her adoptive mother, Brenda Hollis.
Pochek said she was a basket case before the reunion — but that a hug quickly broke the ice.
“I was extremely nervous. I knew I was at the advantage, because I had seen interviews that she had done, and I was just so proud of her, and how articulate she was in expressing her feelings, and grateful for her mom for a beautiful childhood that she gave her,” she said on the show.
The baby was discovered wrapped in a red sweater in the ladies room of the Allentown Burger King on Sept. 15, 1986.
Brenda and Carl Hollis adopted her, and told her about her amazing story when she was 12 and working on a genealogy project for school.
Since then, Deprill grew obsessed with tracking down her biological mom, and Brenda Hollis told her to give social media a shot.
“I said, ‘Why don’t you put it on Facebook just for fun and see what happens?’ Never in a million years did we expect this to happen,” Hollis recalled.
Pochek, meanwhile, revealed the shocking details of her own life story, explaining why she abandoned her baby in such a secretive manner.
She was raped on a spring break vacation when she was 16, but never told anyone about the attack or her pregnancy — not even her own parents.
She was so terrified of being discovered, she gave birth in her bedroom and left the baby girl in the fast-food joint.
Pochek said on the show that she knew she was taking a risk coming forward because of the harsh judgments she could face, but felt it was important for the truth to come out to prevent some other young woman from making the same mistake.
“If we can help some other girl who is in the situation that I was in, it’s worth a little bit of judgment that people might bring upon us. If it’s just one girl that we can help, it’s worth it,” Pochek said.
Deprill now has three children of her own, while Pochek is married and has a 23-year-old stepson.