Ned Arnel Holness was born in San Pedro Sula, Honduras, the seventeenth of eighteen children. At the time of his birth, his mother, Magdelena Mencía from Mexico, was engaged in a domestic dispute with his father, Honduran Roberto Holness, and declined to give her son his biological father's last name.[1] The name appearing on his birth certificate is "Ned Arnel Mencía", although Mencia has said that out of respect for his biological father he went by the Holness name anyway, and was known as "Ned Holness" until he was eighteen years old.[2]