A former Miss Nevada is preparing for a special reunion over four decades in the making. Elizabeth Hunterton will meet her biological mother for the very first time this week, as she shared with PEOPLE.
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In January 1980, just ten days after she was born, Elizabeth Hunterton was discovered by two pilots at a Nevada airport. She was eventually adopted and raised by a white family in Reno. She always knew she was bi-racial. But it wasn’t until 2018 that she was able to begin answering some of the questions about her birth story.
Using DNA matching, Hunterton was able to identify her father, who was Black, although he passed away in 2004. In 2020, she made a connection with a second cousin on her mother’s side, who was able to assist her identify her mother, who is Japanese.
Although Hunterton and her birth mother have exchanged text messages and emails off and on since 2020, the two took a giant leap forward in their relationship when they spoke for the first time on January 1 of this year. The 44-year-old pageant winner told PEOPLE that she immediately felt something familiar.
“It was like, I remember you — and it was just this really weird, unsettling moment,” she said. “I guess I just didn’t expect to recognize it, and it was very sweet, talking to her.”
Hunterton said her mother told her she regrets giving her up, but that she wasn’t emotionally or financially prepared to care for a baby at the time. She asked a friend to take Elizabeth to an adoption agency, but she believes she was left at the airport because adoption agencies wouldn’t take a Black baby.
Now that the two are connected, Hunterton told PEOPLE she gave her mother permission to let go of her guilt and live her life.
“Once I found her, she said, ‘You know, now that I know that you’re okay, would it be okay if I allowed myself to live?” I’m like, “ ‘Girl, live your life. Fly, baby bird. Live your best life. You’re torturing yourself for something that I never believed you needed to be forgiven for,’ “ she said.
Hunterton talks about her experience on TikTok, where she shares her stories with her over 130,000 followers – a place where she has found community and fans who want to know what happens when she and her mom finally meet.
“When I talked to my therapist about it, he said that that would be a really helpful part of my healing journey, to just learn how to talk about it,” Hunterton said. “That was why I got on there. I didn’t expect it to do what it did, you know?”
“Some people’s stories begin the day they were born. Mine begins the day I was found,” Hunterton told “Inside Edition.”
