STRONGSVILLE, Ohio _ Dominique Moceanu was nine months pregnant with her first child. Her father was dying from a rare eye cancer.
Studying for a degree in business management at John Carroll University, she had just come out of a statistics final, her first of five that week.
Then the gold-medal-winning Olympic gymnast went to pick up the package.
It was December 2007, and the enclosed letter delivered a bombshell.
She didn't have one sister, but two.
Jennifer Bricker, the middle child of her Romanian-born parents Dimitry and Camelia Moceanu, had been born without legs and given up for adoption because the family couldn't afford her medical care.
Moceanu saw the documents bearing her parents' signatures and the photos. Jennifer looked like a twin to her sister Christina. Moceanu was floored, but also knew there wasn't any doubt.
"I'm usually very cautious with believing things people say because they try to get close to you," Moceanu said. "But I knew, with the way she had packaged everything ... it was chilling. There was a part of me that was overcome with emotion and I didn't want that emotion to adversely affect my unborn baby."
Moceanu coped with the biggest shock of her life with the same toughness she'd shown at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta as a 4-foot-4, 75-pound 14-year-old. Moceanu competed with a stress fracture in her right leg that hurt her chances for an individual medal, but was part of the "Magnificent Seven" that captured Team USA's first gold in women's gymnastics.
The second wouldn't come until 2012, when the "Fierce Five" prevailed in London. Moceanu remains the youngest American gymnast to win gold.
"I felt like I've had to be tough my whole life. I felt like I had to be the adult my whole life, even as a child when I had to step up and try to make decisions that were probably way beyond my years," Moceanu said during a July 21 interview at a Strongsville coffee shop. "I look back and can't believe I was put in those situations and how did I deal with it? How did I come out OK on the other side?"
