Lost and found daughter

Lisa Ferguson

Thursday, Nov. 13, 1997 | 10:29 a.m.

All Barry Mastrodomenico wants is to hug his daughter.

But for now, the Henderson resident must settle for the frequent e-mails he receives from 17-year-old Jennifer Moore, the child he has never met.

"It's been hard to accept the fact that I don't know who she is and ... that I have only spoken with her (on the telephone) twice and that I only have five pictures of her in 17 years," says Mastrodomenico.

After years spent searching for the girl -- establishing and losing contact with her through her mother several times -- he recently tracked Jennifer down and reconnected with her via the Internet.

His search also prompted him and brother-in-law John Guay, a former Las Vegas craps dealer now residing in Massachusetts, to start their own business, John Barry and Associates, two months ago. The company conducts computerized background and pre-employment checks and "people locating" searches for its clients.

"I think a lot of people would have said, 'The heck with this,' but there was something in me where I just couldn't let go," Mastrodomenico says of his search for Jennifer. "I needed to know who she was. She's part of me."

Flash back to 1979: Mastrodomenico, then a graduating high school senior, was eager to leave the tiny, rural town of Chautauqua, N.Y., behind and return to his Southern California roots.

"A couple of weeks after I got back to California, I got a phone call (from his high school sweetheart) saying, 'I'm pregnant,' " he recalls. "And my life has never been the same. I was 17, she was 16. It was rough. We were pretty much the victims of high school romance."

It was his understanding, however, that the pregnancy would be terminated. But when the check he sent to cover the medical costs was returned, the situation "got really, really messy," he says.

Jennifer was born in March of 1980 and Mastrodomenico returned to the town three months later to visit his new daughter and "to see if things could be worked out" with her mother. Instead, he was barred from visiting the infant. "From that point on ... I was then the bad guy," he contends.

Contact with mother and child all but ceased until Jennifer was 5 years old -- the same year as Mastrodomenico's fifth high school reunion. That's when a mutual friend gave him an address where they could be reached.

"I contacted a very angry person," Mastrodomenico says of his former flame. "She contended that I had no place in my daughter's life." Besides not having been named on Jennifer's birth certificate as her father, he also learned that the child's stepfather had legally adopted her.

Still, 36-year-old Mastrodomenico continued his battle to become a part of Jennifer's world. During those years that he had a valid address for her, he'd send the girl birthday cards and Christmas gifts, and letters to her mother.

"It was always not in the back of my head, but pretty much toward the front, that there was someone out there that I need to get to know and I don't know how to find this person," he says.

Then, four years ago, Jennifer intercepted one of her biological father's letters. "That's how I knew that (he and her mother) were still communicating, so I decided to write him," the teen says in a call from Eden, N.Y.

But it wasn't long before relations again fizzled. (The specific reasons depend on who you ask: "He stopped writing," Jennifer says, while Mastrodomenico chalks it up to "a misunderstanding.")

Meanwhile, both father and daughter's lives went on. Mastrodomenico moved to Southern Nevada in 1990 and married his wife, Dawn, a local school teacher, three years later. The couple has a 2-year-old son.

Jennifer's relationship with her mother soured, and she repeatedly ran away from home. After a year spent living in a youth home, she now resides with her stepfather.

Last year, curiosity over his daughter's whereabouts again got the better of Mastrodomenico. That's when he turned to his home computer for help.

"Knowing the geography of where she was, I figured I had a shot" of finding her, he says. One of his first stops on the information superhighway was America Online's "members directory." He subsequently e-mailed anyone living in the same town as Jennifer, in hopes of finding someone who knew her.

He received only one response: A school teacher who knew someone who knew Jennifer's half-sisters. "I got lucky," Mastrodomenico says. "Now we had a channel." That person then agreed to forward the e-mails he wrote on to Jennifer.

"Pretty covert, but it worked," he says. Within 10 days of his initial contact with the "channel" in September, Mastrodomenico was speaking on the telephone to Jennifer. "It was simply exhilarating," he says.

The two spent an hour catching up on the past and present and why he was so desperate to make contact in the first place. "I told her, 'Because you are a part of me,' and she said, 'That's good to hear because I've felt the same way,' but she had no way of telling me," he says.

Now they chat on-line several times a week. "It's like I'm talking to myself. She's into the paranormal, I'm into the paranormal. So it's like, where did these things come from? That's the interesting part."

"It was a little iffy at first," says Jennifer, explaining how she questioned whether or not to "get in touch right back. I don't know him. All I know is what my mother said, what my family said. I decided that I'm old enough to deal with it and the least I could do was talk to him.

"It was great," she says of the pair's initial conversation. "Actually, we're a lot alike -- just the things we say, things we've done, habits and stuff. It's kind of scary."

"I'm an open book," Mastrodomenico says. "I told her from the get-go: 'We've got 17 and a half years to catch up on (and) whatever you want to know, let me know.' "

The two have set a tentative date to meet next summer. "I want to take it really slow, just kind of see what happens," says Jennifer, a high school senior.

For now, she says, she thinks of Mastrodomenico as "a friend" rather than a father. "It's going to be on my terms whether or not we take this any further, and he knows that. I'm still trying to adjust to it. It's just really weird," she says.

"It's been almost 18 years and I have a life aside from him, but I'm trying for the both of us to establish some kind of relationship. We know where each other is (now), so it's like there are no excuses not to anymore."

Now Mastrodomenico wants to help others find their lost loved ones. So far, John Barry and Associates has conducted about 20 searches and reports a 98 percent success rate.

"The bread-and-butter for me is going to be the people locating, because that's the curiosity factor," Mastrodomenico says. "The people we used to go to school with, the people we grew up with, relatives or whatever are so spread out now.

"If I can make anyone else feel the way I do right now, that's what it's all about."