Family unexpectedly meets man who received loved one's heart: 'I'm so blown away'

Savannah Roesch, Katie Seper and Brenden Bulger attended a St. Louis Cardinals-Cincinnati Reds game on Sunday to support organ donation and honor their late brother, Donovan Bulger. Little did the family know that the event would unite them with the very recipient of their sibling’s heart.

Now a video of the chance encounter is going viral.

“Today was a day I will NEVER EVER forget!!!!! This is definitely an amazing experience & am just SO blown away!!” Roesch wrote on Facebook detailing the unexpected encounter. “We would have walked past each other & would have never met!”

On Aug. 9, 2016, Roesch’s younger brother, Donavan, was declared brain-dead following a car accident. His heart was donated two days later to John Sueme, who had been in heart failure for five years, saving the man’s life.

Rosesch, 33, tells Yahoo Lifestyle that her family received an anonymous letter from Sueme nearly a year ago. Because of strict patient-donor confidentiality policies and laws, contact during the first year after a transplant is only allowed if the correspondence does not reveal either party’s identity. Roesch wrote back and had been waiting for a reply ever since.

“It took me four months to write back, but I wrote who we are and how awesome my brother was,” Roesch tells Yahoo Lifestyle. “You’re so close to that moment you’re waiting for but you just don’t know.”

Fast-forward to Sunday, when Roesch and her siblings attended the annual Washington University and Barnes-Jewish Transplant Center and the St. Louis Children's Hospital’s Transplant Awareness Day event in honor of Donovan’s decision to donate his organs.

The group even wore matching custom-made lime green t-shirts for the occasion that read “Brother, Organ Donor & HERO!” with a portrait of Donovan on the front. The bright shirts were hard to miss in the crowd of people at Busch Stadium. Fortunately, they caught the eye of the family whose life was changed by Donavan’s good deed.

After the group finished posing for a photo, Roesch was speaking to the photographer when someone approached her.

“I hear in the background, ‘Are you Donovan's family?’I thought it was someone he knew from school that wanted to give their condolences,” says Roesch. But to her surprise, the group was Donavan’s heart recipient and his family. They recognized Donavan’s face on their t-shirts from the photos she had sent.

“There was a lot of crying and we were in complete and utter shock,” says Roesch. “I can’t even explain it.”

After spending time getting to know the family, Sueme offered to let the siblings listen to Donovan’s heart in his chest. “It was like hugging my brother again when he listened to his heart. It’s a piece of him. A piece of him is literally living inside of him,” Roesch says. A video of the unexpected encounter shows Roesch and crying as she presses her ear to his chest, listening to her brother’s heart. After Roesch recovered from the shock of their fortuitous meeting, Roesch and her siblings posed for another picture with their “newfound family.”

“There is a special connection between all those affected by organ donation and transplant. Each person has a story to tell about their own journey or that of their loved one,” says Gene Ridolfi, director, Washington University and Barnes-Jewish Hospital Transplant Center. The organization organizes the Transplant Awareness Day event with the St. Louis Cardinals every year. “Our Transplant Center has performed more than 10,000 transplants and I have been fortunate enough to witness many of these reunions. The chance meeting between Mr. Sueme and the family of Donovan Bulger was truly special – it is a testament to the life-saving impact of organ donation.”

Roesch echoes the sentiment, saying that hearing about Sueme’s second chance at life gave her family a “sense of peace that [Donovan is] living on through others.”

“John has three daughters and a grandson. Yes, we lost our brother but he has a new chance at life,” Roesch tells Yahoo Lifestyle. “My brother was so giving and loving and did so much for so many people. It continues when he’s not even here. It’s so important to us as siblings to share this because it’s really promoting the importance of organ donation.”

For Roesch, the fortuitous meeting was a moment she will “never forget.” But, she believes it was more than chance that brought the two families together.

“There’s no doubt in my mind that this was definitely my brother planning this because we’ve all just suffered so much from this,” says Roesch.

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