Six long-lost sisters found each other. Now they seek their brother.

Yahoo

27-02-2025

A week before Christmas, six sisters flew into a snowstorm to reunite in a Buffalo, New York, basement. There they stood, oldest to youngest, taking turns reciting from a script.
'If your name is Giovanni … and you were born in Tampa General Hospital … on Feb. 14, 2009 … and you're 15 years old … and your parents are the doctors who delivered you … we're your sisters," they said in a bubbly cadence. They leaned in, beaming identical smiles. 'And we want to meet you!'
It was the oldest sister's plan. It's always her plan, the second- youngest sister said.
'She'll get these ideas, like, we're all running off to Europe together,' Monica Juliana, 18, said of Catrina Palmer, 25. 'So we did the video to humor her, and I was thinking, 'Nobody is going to see this.''
Many, many people viewed the 14-second clip, which amassed 62 million views on TikTok and millions more on Instagram. Tens of thousands of commenters begged for updates, claimed to have leads, or questioned whether Giovanni ever would — or should — see the video.
Going by 'the Juliana sisters' after the biological parents they share, the young women are Catrina and Gigi Palmer, 23, of Tampa; Alexia Bowerman, 20, of Ohio; Anna Bowerman, 19, and Bella Bowerman, 13, of Buffalo; and Monica, who lives in West Virginia.
A handful of leads seemed promising, and they were hopeful that by Christmas they'd find the brother they believed had been adopted by Tampa doctors. But what if Giovanni didn't know he was adopted, some commenters questioned. What if his family did not want to be found?
'We don't want to mess up his life,' Catrina said weeks after their video went viral. 'We just want him to know that we exist and we love him, and we're here if he ever wants us.'
The sisters, of course, already knew from experience the valid reasons why families keep adoptions closed and private. They also knew that pushing through the emotional complications had, in their case, proven worth it.
What the millions who had watched their plea didn't know was how luck and teenage precociousness had led them to one another despite being raised in foster systems and closed adoptions 1,000 miles apart.
The sisters' biological parents, Devin and Tiffany Juliana, struggled with addiction, their lives beginning to unravel before most of their seven children were born.
Catrina arrived when her mother, who had been abandoned by her own family, was 16. Her father, seven years older, was a small-time drug dealer. Things weren't stable, but Catrina didn't doubt their love.
By the time she and Gigi were toddlers, their parents were bouncing between courtrooms and arrests, trying to keep the family together. They fled warrants from Tampa to Buffalo and back.
Their father finally went to prison. Their mother violated a Florida court order by leaving the girls with their grandmother when she surrendered to police, too. When the cops arrived at their grandma's place, the sisters were supposed to hide. Catrina remembered being told that the police weren't always bad, so she walked out.
Catrina recalls the Hillsborough County home where they were placed as the kind that foster kids whisper about. 'Everything was super rationed out,' she said. 'We could have cereal but no milk. We had to be outside all day. Clearly, it was just meant to bring in money.'
At a supervised visit at a Tampa McDonald's, their father promised they would be together again. When the social worker rolled the car window up to drive the girls away, Catrina's father playfully fogged the glass with his breath, but she noticed his tears.
Nearly two years into foster care, a surgical tech who worked with the girls' foster father at a hospital saw their photo. She and her husband had lost a teen daughter to leukemia. Cathy and Bill Palmer decided to foster the girls and hope to adopt.
Coincidentally, the very week the girls moved into their new home in Wesley Chapel, the court terminated their birth parents' parental rights. They had missed court in Florida because it had overlapped with another custody hearing for another daughter in New York.
In a closed adoption, names, birth certificates and Social Security numbers are changed. At ages 6 and 4, Catrina and Gigi became different people on paper.
Aiming to avoid false hope, their adopted father broke it bluntly: The would never see their birth parents again.
But he promised, the girls cried on the couch.
Catrina understands now that their adoptive parents weren't cruel, but protective. Life stabilized, then settled into a deep familial love, with big Christmases and Disney trips, karate lessons, guitar and violin.
'At the same time, they almost wanted it to seem like my biological parents didn't exist,' Catrina said. But the girls remembered so much — including learning during those supervised visits that they now had two younger sisters.
Their adoptive father told Catrina and Gigi that, when they turned 18, he would help them find those sisters. It was the only aspect of their pre-adoption life ever spoken of at home.
As the girls grew, they'd sneak into the room where a thin case file was kept in the bottom of a box. They would steal peeks at their own baby photos, lingering over images of their biological parents and a baby sister.
By 16, Catrina was outspoken in her pride about being adopted, the way her mom said, 'We chose you.' She advocated passionately for adoption, once correcting a teacher who called it prohibitively expensive.
One day a friend asked if she had a photo of her biological dad. No, but she could Google a mug shot. Scrolling through the results on a school computer, she was stunned to see her and Gigi's full birth names. Their biological aunt had posted on an adoption registry site: 'We just want to know they're OK.'
Catrina felt unsure. She always had been told some version of, 'Your biological family doesn't care about you,' she said. Now someone was looking for them? In their room, she asked Gigi, then 14, if they should reach out. Gigi surprised her with an emphatic yes.
'My name is Gigi and my sister Catrina found this article about two little girls online. They sound exactly like my sister and I,' Gigi wrote sheepishly by email from Wesley Chapel. 'If u have no idea who I am then I'm sorry for the inconvenience.'
In New York, their 9-year-old sister Monica saw their aunt running around the house screaming and crying. She'd gotten the message.
Catrina covertly planned the first call with their aunt and grandma during a study hall period at school, so her adoptive parents wouldn't know. Catrina asked the questions as Gigi leaned over her shoulder, both thrilled as their aunt gave detail to vaguely sketched memories.
The topics ranged from trivial to shattering. They had come from a line of serious Buffalo Bills fanatics. Their slip into foster care had, contrary to what they had always thought, left a deep family scar.
Their parents were in jail, the aunt told them. The biggest surprise: Beyond those two sisters they had wondered about, the girls had three more siblings.
Anna and Alexia had been adopted years earlier by a nearby family in Buffalo, allowing contact with their biological family. Monica and Bella still lived with their biological grandmother, though they too would eventually land in the foster system after a series of family tragedies. Bella would be adopted by the same family as Anna and Alexia.
Monica, who had grown up the longest with their biological parents, bounced between homes and struggled to find the right fit. Eventually, she was adopted by a West Virginia teacher named Susan. Susan is awesome, Monica said, but to her, Tiffany will always be 'my mom.' She calls Susan, 'my Susan.'
Giovanni, born between Monica and Bella, was the last mystery. Knowing the state would take Giovanni if he was born drug-positive in Tampa, their biological parents had planned to flee to Thailand for his birth. But Giovanni came early, with complications.
His closed adoption left no trace. Monica remembers her mother, inconsolable. 'She grieved for all of the kids she lost,' Monica said. 'When birthdays would come around … my mom would just sit and stare at the wall.'
Catrina, Gigi, Monica and Bella finally met by phone. In Florida, Catrina and Gigi found a quiet spot in a hallway at school. In New York, their tearful grandmother sat down Monica and Bella. 'Remember the sisters you heard about?' she said.
'I felt like I was talking to my mini-me,' Catrina said of that first call with Monica. 'It was like God copied and pasted our personalities.' Both were serious and self-reliant. Both wanted to be lawyers.
'This stranger,' said Monica, understood me in a way no one else could.'
Bella was only 5, but her vibrance clearly reflected Gigi's sunshiney demeanor. Both are natural performers, a dancer and a gymnast. The sisters reached Alexia and Anna's adoptive mother, who connected them, too. On video calls, it felt like they were all staring into their own dark eyes.
Eventually, Catrina and Gigi even started calling their biological parents. For two years, they kept all contact with their biological family secret.
When Catrina finally confessed to her adoptive parents, they took it hard. 'They felt betrayed,' she said. 'It was tough. I get it. I don't think they had a great understanding of addiction as a disease or how someone could do that to their kids.'
In those early calls with Catrina and Gigi, Devin and Tiffany disarmed their biological daughters with openness. Any question was fair game. The sisters appreciated that they acknowledged they weren't entitled to a relationship with them — but seemed grateful for a chance.
The first time the girls were all together, they went to Universal Studios, held hands, skipped through the park in matching Harry Potter robes. 'Life-changing,' Monica said.
Back at the hotel, they spent hours cuddled up on a bed, describing themselves and discovering their similarities —creativity, ambition, an independent streak — and differences. Three are photographers, two are dancers.
Years later, they call Catrina 'the matriarch,' a role she takes seriously. She tattooed her sisters' names on her fingers, to remind her to call. Their constantly active group text is titled Sister Cult.
They've had disagreements, especially when coordinating visits. 'One sister will say, 'You're not making enough time for me,' and another will say, 'You just want me to drive you around,'' Catrina said. That, she now knows, is life with sisters.
Catrina worries that they lost their carefree years together since they're now dealing with college and relationships and careers, but mostly she's just grateful. Not long after she had first stumbled onto it, she tried to revisit their aunt's adoption registry post. It had vanished.
When they reunited in Buffalo to film their viral TikTok, it had been a couple of years since they were all together. They surprised their youngest sister, Bella, who had no idea they were coming.
The older girls found a sports bar, empty due to the snowstorm, and played Chappell Roan's 'Pink Pony Club' as they danced on the bar. The bartender brought out sparklers to celebrate their reunion. An epic night, though, for a moment, Catrina wondered, What if Giovanni was here?
Catrina is a legal recruiter finishing a psychology degree at the University of South Florida, and Gigi is a talented choreographer who teaches dance at All That Dance studio in Tampa. Anna is enrolled in an accelerated doctor of physical therapy program, and Alexia is a server and car-show photographer with a gift for social media management. Monica, who missed so much school she had to teach herself to read, is valedictorian and has interviewed for admission to Princeton. Bella is a talented gymnast who the sisters believe was born to entertain.
They sometimes call Catrina the 'curse breaker.' She says they're all the curse breakers, ending a cycle of addiction going back generations.
Devin and Tiffany finally got clean. They own a home. They have dogs. They own their mistakes.
They visited Gigi and Catrina for the first time at Catrina's freshman college apartment near USF. There were teary eyes, hugs and a weird familiarity.
'You know how you just feel it when you're with family?' Catrina said. When Devin and Tiffany come to Florida now, they all eat at the Columbia in Ybor City.
Forgiving them was an act of grace toward their birth parents, but also toward themselves. Love, Catrina said, is infinite, which is to say that loving more people doesn't mean there's less for other family.
'I can choose,' she said, 'to have that joy in my life.'
Time softened their adoptive parents' stance. Today, they have embraced Catrina and Gigi's other sisters and even met their biological mother at Gigi's graduation. There's still some awkwardness, but it's working.
Sometimes, Catrina pictures her wedding day. Bill, the man who raised her, walks her down the aisle. But Devin is there. That would be perfect.
As weeks passed, it became clearer that finding Giovanni could take more than a video. The most promising leads fizzled. Privacy laws have stifled helpful sleuths.
It's likely Giovanni's name was changed. The clue that doctors adopted him — something the siblings' biological father remembers hearing — might be inaccurate.
Catrina and her sisters don't resent anyone for entering into a closed adoption. But they hope their story shows what can happen when adopted children can maintain connections with their biological family.
The video was a long shot, but so was their aunt's online post. They hope Giovanni is curious, like they were. Someday, maybe, he'll go looking, and they'll be waiting for him.