Long Lost Sisters Reunite at High School Track Meet
March 14, 2013— -- Long lost sisters Jordan Dickerson and Robin Jeter had lived in the same city for 17 years, but they never crossed paths until their high schools faced off at a Washington DC track meet.
The two teens began to suspect they had more than sports in common when Dickerson' teammates at Woodrow Wilson High School noticed that a rival runner from Friendship Collegiate Academy bore a striking resemblance to their friend.
"Everyone was saying, 'It's your twin, look at your twin over there!'" Dickerson's mother, Patrice Dickerson, told ABC News of the chance encounter. "They were freaked out by how much they resembled each other."
"We were just scoping each other out," Jordan Dickerson told ABC News. "I was trying to look for her [at the track meet] to see how much she looked like me."
By the end of the event, Jordan finally worked up the courage to ask someone who that other girl was.
"They told me her name was Robin Jeter. I had previously known my birth name was Jeter. The reality instantly hit me that she was my sister," Dickerson said.
"She knew," her mother said, "and she immediately started crying."
"I was crying in the middle of the bleachers for no reason. It was embarrassing," Jordan said.
Patrice Dickerson adopted Jordan when she was only 3 months old. She said she had been open with her daughter about her adoption as well as the possibility that she might have siblings.
Mrs. Dickerson said the two girls eventually approached each other at the meet and exchanged phone numbers. But Jordan did not broach the subject that the two could be related until Jeter called that same night.
"I didn't want to say, 'Oh you know you're my sister' right then at the track meet,'" Jordan said.
When the teens spoke, they talked about their childhoods, Mrs. Dickerson said. The two realized they were sisters when Jordan shared that she was adopted and that her birth mother's name was Jeter.
The sisters also learned they were born nearly nine months apart. Jordan is the younger sister at 17. Robin is 18.
"Both of them were thrilled," Patrice Dickerson said of their discovery.
Patrice Dickerson's sister, Vera Holtzclaw, told ABC News that her niece texted the entire family after she met Jeter for the first time.
"It was a simple teenager text, 'I have to tell you the details later but here's a picture of my sister and I, we found each other at a track meet,'" said Holtzclaw. "They were smiling the biggest smiles you could ever imagine."
It was Jordan Dickerson's first season running track. If she hadn't joined the team, "this never would have happened," she said.
Since their reunion in January, the two teens have been trying to make up for lost time.
"Robin has been able to spend most weekends with us at my house with Jordan and myself, and we're able to go do family things," Patrice Dickerson said. "They spend a lot of time with the door closed, giggling."
"We have the same mannerisms, we like the same foods, we have the same shoe size, we talk the same, we run the same in track," Jordan said. "We're so much the same that I haven't really thought of ways we're different."
For Mother's Day, Jordan met her biological mother for the first time.
"Jordan had been looking forward to this moment her whole life. As a result, so did I," said Patrice Dickerson. "The meeting went better than I could have dreamed."
While Robin currently lives with a legal guardian, she lived with her mother at a point in time, Dickerson said.
