Stasi Biological Father [top] | Tiffany

was not dead. His name was Juan Carlos Vélez . Part Four: The Man Who Wasn’t There Juan Carlos Vélez was a Colombian immigrant who had worked as a short-order cook in Patchogue, Long Island, in the mid-1990s. He and Lori had a brief, intense affair while she was separated from her first husband. When Lori discovered she was pregnant, Juan Carlos wanted to marry her, to raise the child together. But Lori, by all accounts, was ambivalent. She was young, scared, and already struggling with the stigma of a failed marriage. Mark Stasi had already begun courting her—charming, stable, offering a home and a name.

When Lori married Mark Stasi when Tiffany was three, Mark adopted her. The adoption was meant to be a fresh start—a new name, a new family, a new identity. But for Tiffany, the adoption papers were a locked door. Every time she asked Lori about her biological father, the answers were vague: “It didn’t work out.” “He wasn’t ready to be a dad.” “You’re better off not knowing.” tiffany stasi biological father

Three weeks later, a video call. When Juan Carlos’s face appeared—those same kind eyes from the faded fair photo—Tiffany broke down. He wept openly, speaking rapid Spanish she barely understood, but the emotion needed no translation. In 2019, Tiffany flew to Medellín. She stepped off the plane into a wall of tropical heat and found Juan Carlos holding a sign that read “MI HIJA” —my daughter. He had brought his wife, his sons, his mother. The entire family embraced her as if she had been lost at sea and had finally drifted home. was not dead

The DNA matches led her to a cluster of second cousins in Bogotá. Through patient messaging and old-school detective work—Facebook stalking, obituaries, immigration records—she pieced together the story. He and Lori had a brief, intense affair

Tiffany didn’t stop. Without Mark’s controlling presence, Tiffany had access to old family records, letters, and her mother’s closeted past. She found a crumpled, yellowed photo in a shoebox: a man with kind eyes and a goatee, arm around a younger Lori at a county fair in 1996. On the back, in Lori’s handwriting: “John, Montauk, summer.”

In 2014, when Tiffany was a teenager, Mark Stasi was arrested for the murder of his second wife, , a Colombian immigrant and mother of two young children. The case was brutal. Ana Maria had been missing for months before her dismembered remains were found stuffed into suitcases and dumped along the Southern State Parkway. Prosecutors painted Mark as a controlling narcissist who killed Ana Maria when she threatened to leave him—just as his first marriage had collapsed under similar accusations of abuse.