Siblings Find, Meet Long-Lost Brothers

For as long as he can remember, Robert Mike Romero of Arleta said he felt something missing from his life.

Perhaps, he said, the thoughts traced to that one day in his childhood in Mexico City when he saw two unfamiliar boys run toward his dad.

“As they were running, they had their arms stretched out yelling, ‘Father, father,’ ” Romero, 58, recalled. “I didn’t forget about it.”

Romero moved with his parents and seven siblings to the United States in 1949, but he never forgot the mysterious boys and that strange experience.

His brother Henry Romero said he also saw the unfamiliar boys as a child.

After years of wondering, Henry, 57, traveled to Mexico City on a series of recent business trips and while there asked about the boys.

Henry, Robert Mike and the other siblings had come to realize the boys were their half brothers, sons of their father’s from a relationship with another woman.

After a year of searches, Henry Romero found the half brothers in February.

In March, he and other relatives traveled from the United States to Mexico to welcome Roberto and Carlos Ordonez Acosta into the family and soon afterward arranged to fly them here for the first time.

For the last two weeks, the Romeros and their relatives shepherded the half brothers and their immediate families from attraction to attraction, a vacation that culminated Saturday with the Romeros’ annual family reunion at Veterans Memorial Park in Sylmar.

The two half brothers departed Monday.

While here, the half brothers met with their father, who separated from the family in 1957, remarried and lives in Sylmar, Henry Romero said.

“This has been just great,” Robert Mike Romero said of the visit. “They’re a humble family. When they come to this country and they see the fruit of it, it’s just really unbelievable.”