DENVER - A Lochbuie woman's Facebook plea to find the brother she hasn't seen since they were kids more than a dozen years ago went viral and, thanks to the re-post and story on TheDenverChannel.com, she found him.
A woman who saw TheDenverChannel post emailed 7NEWS with her contact information and information on Julia Mauer's possible brother. We passed the info along to Mauer Wednesday night.
"This tip led me to him,"Mauer told 7NEWS. "(The tipster) actually messaged me on Facebook as well and helped me find him! I am beside myself. I don't think I have ever felt happiness like this!"
She said finding her long lost brother is a "new beginning" and that she has part of her family back and part of herself back.
Mauer, 24, found her brother, Isaiah Luke, 19, only 30 miles away in Aurora, Colo.
She lost contact with him around 2001.
That was when Mauer, her twin sister, Isaiah and another younger sister, Sarah, were removed from their Lochbuie home. Her parents struggled with drugs and there were repeated incidents of abuse, she said.
Julia's paternal grandmother received custody of Mauer and her twin sister. However, Isaiah and Sarah, who had a different father, were placed with their paternal grandmother but that home was later found to be unfit and they were eventually put in the foster care system and adopted out to different families.
She had very few clues about what happened to them, but had been thinking about Isaiah and Sarah every single day.
Mauer began her search for her brother about five years ago. She scoured Facebook and went as far as looking up athletic rosters and high school online yearbooks to find Isaiah.
"I have looked high and low, searched his name a million times on Facebook," searching three to four days out of the week, "thinking of any way I could possibly find him," she told ABC News,
On Wednesday, she posted a photo of herself with a plea to help find her brother on TheDenverChannel Facebook page which we shared with our 110,000 fans. The message urged people to share her story, to tell people of her "little brother named Isaiah Luke who has been missing from my life for the past 12 1/2 years."
By Wednesday night, a woman emailed 7NEWS to say, "I think the young man is my cousin's adopted son." She gave her contact info to us which we forwarded it to Mauer.
The tipster told Mauer her brother had adopted a boy that matched the description except he was born in December of 1993 and not 1994.
Mauer gave it a shot. She typed in the last name of the adoptive family and what she saw has convinced her that she found her brother: his photo, the blue eyes and the middle name of Luke.
"I almost literally passed out .. I was just crying uncontrollably for about three hours. I fall to pieces talking about it," Mauer told ABC News, "If you can't go a day without thinking of somebody, it's proof they should be in their life."
They are now are friends on Facebook but haven't met in person.
All these years she's wondered if her brother ever thought about her and her twin sister. In a response through Facebook messaging, Isaiah wrote, "I've spent the last 12 years telling everybody about my sisters."
"That melted my heart," Mauer said.
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