Jasmin and Elizabeth Ramos were abandoned in a public bathroom in California in 1989.
PHOTO: Mohave County Sheriff’s Office/Facebook
For more than three decades, they lived with the mystery of why they were abandoned as babies. Now they’ve learned the bittersweet truth. Their mother didn’t leave them by choice – she was murdered.
Tina and Melissa had always known their story began in tragedy. The pair were found crying on the wet floor of a women’s restroom at a park in California in the US in December 1989 when they were just babies.
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Growing up, they collected newspaper clippings about their discovery, pieced together fragments of their past and held on to the hope that someday they’d understand why someone would leave them there.
When police investigator Lori Miller recently reached out, they knew that day had finally come.
“Whether it was my mom or dad, she knew something. I just ran out of the room and didn’t even know how to process what was being said,” Melissa says of the life-changing call.
A newspaper clipping of the missing children.
PHOTO: Mohave County Sheriff’s Office/Facebook
The sisters, originally named Elizabeth and Jasmin Ramos, had no idea that as they lay crying in that restroom, their mother Marina was already dead. Her body had been discovered in the Arizona desert, 80km south of Las Vegas, two days earlier. She had multiple stab wounds.
For decades Marina remained unidentified, known only as Jane Doe.
Then in 2022 investigators had a breakthrough when Marina’s fingerprints matched those of someone who had been arrested for shoplifting in June 1989.
Marina Ramos’s body was found in Las Vegas in December 1989, but she wasn’t identified at the time.
Mohave County Sheriff’s Office/Facebook
Following this lead, investigators traced Marina’s family to California, where they found a relative who confirmed that Marina and her two young daughters – 14-month-old Elizabeth and 2-month-old Jasmin – had disappeared in 1989.
The final confirmation came through DNA testing in August 2025, when authorities matched samples from Marina’s relatives with the sisters.
Despite the traumatic start to their lives, Melissa and Tina have thrived. After being discovered by a man who heard them crying and asked a woman to check the restroom, they were placed in foster care and later adopted together by a loving couple who renamed them.
“I want everyone to know that I’m okay. I’m here. I have lived a beautiful life. I have a wonderful husband,” Melissa (formerly Elizabeth) says.
The girls were later adopted and renamed Tina and Melissa.
PHOTO: Mohave County Sheriff’s Office/Facebook
The sisters have mixed emotions about finally learning the truth. “This is what I’ve been searching for and wanted for a very, very long time, to figure out where I came from and who my family was,” Tina says.
“I was sad to know that my mom is gone and I will never be able to see her.”
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While the sisters now have the answers they’ve long sought, Marina’s murder remains unsolved.
Police continue investigating, with witnesses reporting they saw a Hispanic woman believed to be Marina with her children and two Hispanic men at the park where the girls were found.
The men are considered suspects in the case.
SOURCES: NBCNEWS.COM, MOHAVE COUNTY SHERIFF’S OFFICE, PEOPLE.COM, MISSINGKIDS.ORG
