VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. (WAVY) – The past year has been anything but ordinary for Asha Rodney.
After three decades, and with the help of resourceful strangers on the internet, Rodney tracked down a long-lost twin brother who lives halfway across the country.
Rodney, 34, and her twin, Moses Cordova, were born in New York in 1988. Rodney said her mother became terminally ill, and had to put the two children up for adoption.
Rodney was adopted by a family in Virginia and had little information about where her brother went. But she had a single photo of the two of them together. She also knew Cordova had suffered a stroke at birth, and has cerebral palsy. One of his defining features, she said, was a clenched left hand.
In the fall of 2021, Rodney lost her adoptive sister, Krystal. Devastated, she resolved to find her brother. Armed with only the first names of his adoptive parents, she took to the internet for help in December 2022.
“I was just like, ‘I need help.’ I need to find him. It was just on my heart,” Rodney explained. “I had my friend make a post for me. And it went viral.”
Her plea for help was shared tens of thousands of times across social media. People on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok sent their well wishes, and some even pitched in to help.
Days later, Rodney got a call from a woman who’d sifted through family trees online. The woman said she had tracked down a name: Mario Cordova. Mario, it turned out, was her twin’s adoptive older brother. Rodney investigated further and found Mario’s immediate family members’ names. She recognized the parents’ names alongside Mario’s.
But a fourth name appeared.
“Moses Cordova. When I read that, everything in me … something in me was like, ‘This is it.’ I put it on Facebook. It popped up ‘Moses Cordova’ and it didn’t have a photo. I scroll down and in the bio it says ‘I’m a Virgo and I’m 34 now,'” she said.
Cordova lived in Houston. She began clicking through Cordova’s photos, noting their resemblance, but remained skeptical.
Then, in the corner of a photo, she saw his hand.
“As I’m scrolling I see a picture and I see his arm, and his hand was clenched. I lost it. I lost it. I lost it,” Rodney said. “I started crying and I started thanking God. At that moment, I said, ‘This is him.’ I could not believe it. It’s been 34 years.”
She sent him a message: It was a photo of the two of them, with a caption reading, “This is us.”
Cordova responded: “I’ve been looking for you my whole life.”
From there, the two spoke on the phone and on FaceTime, catching up on the decades they’d been apart. They swapped photos. It turned out, Cordova had held on to a different photo of the two of them. In his, the twins were seated with their grandmother. Rodney said Cordova’s resemblance to her own 17-year-old son is uncanny.
The holidays this year were like no other, she said, being able to call her twin and wish him a Merry Christmas. Now, she’s raising money for a trip to Houston, so she can hug her twin at long last and introduce her son to his nephew.