For the Lost Blog

This was exactly the kind of story I hoped I wouldn’t see in 2010.

Baby missing as mom spends Christmas in S.A.

The FBI is now searching for missing 8-month-old Gabriel Johnson.

His mother, Elizabeth Johnson, 23, was caught Wednesday in Miami after spending Christmas in San Antonio.

According to police, Johnson left Arizona with her son, but, she does not have custodial rights to him.

In the past, Johnson made threats to harm the baby. She lost custodial rights on December 28, 2009, when she failed to appear at a custody hearing .

So far, there have been no signs of Baby Gabriel since December 26. He was not with Johnson when she was arrested, and she refuses to say what she did with him.

Her car is also missing.

I really, really hope she just left him with a friend or relative. And they turn Gabriel over to the proper authorities. I don’t want to add another dead kid to the list I’ve got already.

I was recently made aware of the case of the missing child Jean Paul Lacombe. He was abducted by his father, Juan Lacombe Vega, which on paper sounds typical enough. However, his father got temporary custody by presenting the court with phony documents. And he had previously abducted his son to France after custody was turned over to his mother. That’s pretty brazen, but not totally out of the realm of possibility. When Jean Paul was turned over to his father, it was videotaped and he protested he didn’t want to go.

And now this case is being cited by the dubious “protective mother parent” movement as a case that somehow vindicates their theory that mothers who abduct only do so to save children from evil abusive fathers. Which is problematic in several ways. First, Vega didn’t win permanent custody in court; he got a temporary order which was rescinded the minute they found out he had used forged documents. Second, the only abductor in the case is Vega and he had a previous abduction under his belt. Third, there is no evidence I have seen that indicates the mother claimed abuse or that she was ever denied custody for reasons of “false abuse accusations.”

The case is a tragedy, and I wish for Jean Paul to be with his mother again as soon as possible. But if this case is supposed to somehow validate the mother-the-hero-abductor movement, it is doing so under shaky ground of their own theories.

Father reunited with daughter after mother leaves country with her

SAN ANTONIO — A Christmas miracle for a father who has been searching for his daughter for nearly two years. Nine-year-old Camille Kaufman, taken by her mother in 2008 in Boerne, has been found. She is finally back home with her father in their new home in Houston.

The search for her was a very long, grueling and emotional one. It took Galen and investigators all the way down to the jungles of Costa Rica. After months of investigating, Galen and detectives found Camille and her mother, Lynanne Foster, hiding out with her boyfriend, Lance Brauer, and his family.

This link was provided in a previous post about Camille. Both this and some articles written before Camille was found indicate that her mother was behaving strangely before her abduction and was worried about such things as “chips implanted in children.” That is a typical psychotic delusion, and while psychosis is not always present in abductors, some could very well have that affliction. I suspected from the first write-up I did of the case there was more to it than I knew; most parents who have a joint custody agreement that allows for essentially equal time and has gone on for several years, as Camille’s mother and father had, do not suddenly abduct their children. (And of course a lot of the comments seem to imply Mom did it for a good reason, despite the fact that her mother’s complaints were about the United States and not her ex-husband.) Apparently her mother remains in Costa Rica; she will be arrested if she leaves the country. I do hope that she does that, and not merely out of a desire for punishment; children need both parents in their lives if they are fit.

The untold tale of family abductions: Three girls missing, an international hunt

Christine Belford agreed to let her ex-husband take their three daughters to Disney World for a two-week vacation. In August 2007, the Delaware mother kissed her little blond girls goodbye.

Those two weeks were unsettling for Belford, then 34. The couple went through a bitter divorce in 2006 which resulted in joint custody of the children. Belford said when the girls were with their dad, they were always difficult to reach.

Two days into the trip, Belford connected by cell phone with her oldest daughter, Laura, then 5. Already homesick, chubby-faced Laura cried as her father checked them into a hotel room.

“I want to come home,” Laura pleaded with her mother.

But Laura and her sisters wouldn’t return to their Delaware home for 19 months.

Of course, to anyone who follows this blog, tales like this are hardly untold: they’re dealt with on an almost daily basis. The fact her kids lost weight and didn’t get medical treatment is also something I am no longer shocked by. The article mentions he’s facing thirty years in prison, but he’s also facing charges of bank fraud in addition to international parental kidnapping. He has thankfully pleaded guilty. And the eldest daughter is still dealing with issues from being told her mother was dead, which I predicted. My hopes for this bringing the problem of family abduction to the greater public is still there, but my realism tells me there will probably never be such a case.

Child abducted to China by father

In New York, he had been an absent father and abusive husband who worked erratically at makeshift jobs. But his calls and e-mail messages from China, where he had gone in the fall of 2007 to teach English, promised his estranged wife that everything had changed. Their little girl deserved the chance to grow up in a two-parent family, he told her, and he sent them airline tickets to join him.

The day after they arrived in Beijing in January of this year, said the wife, Olivia Karolys, the husband, Rodrigo Karolys, took them shopping in a mall far from their hotel, and told her to get her hair done. She watched his reflection in the salon mirror as he held Lenora, then 2 ½.

Then suddenly they were gone.

This is a very long article, but worth reading. I’m glad to see Lenora back home from a place that typically does not extradite. I know of a few cases where children are abducted to China, and perhaps this is a good omen. (I’ll say the abductor keeping an online journal where he bragged about such things was an act of extreme stupidity, however.) Someone on a forum I belong to stated after reading this story it was all done because the dad had kidnapped the child. The implication, of course, is that is the only situation where the law will act. To an extent this is true. I have not seen as many cases where mom reports the kids abducted and the police claim to have their hands tied as is the case where the genders are reversed. Also, as I have said before, people tend to assume mom abducted for a good reason. In both circumstances, however, there are many cases where law enforcement acts right away and starts to look for the child and kidnapper. The biggest problem is the minimization of the effects of parental kidnapping. This effects law enforcement and the public equally. I hope that this article, along with high profile cases that are currently in the news, can bring some desperately needed light to the issue.

Jack and Duncan Connolly.

Christopher, Daniel, and Richard Sanchez.

Diana Alagha.

And now I must add Mitchell Romero to the mix. He was abducted by his father, who had killed his mother. It was an accident, sure. He was in a car in Mexico that rolled over. But that doesn’t make it any easier to deal with.

This is too much to take. After all these dead children, why isn’t parental kidnapping taken seriously? What’s it going to take?

I just found a podcast on international parental kidnapping. Patrick Braden, father of abducted Melissa Braden, speaks on the subject. It’s almost ninety minutes long, but it’s well worth a listen and covers a lot of the bases of the problem.

Both the case of David Goldman and the one of Christopher Savoie have gotten much media attention recently, and since I have not written on the former and have only recently heard of the latter, I felt it was time to write about both.

If there was to be chosen a public face of the left-behind parent, I could think of few better than David Goldman. He was never accused of abuse by his ex-wife. When she died after giving birth to a child in Brazil, any presumption of Sean Goldman’s well-being contingent upon staying with his mother were negated, and he has worked tirelessly to promote his son returning to New Jersey. Much of this publicity has brought attention to the problem of parental kidnapping, especially international kidnapping. Like with many high-profile disappearances, it makes others aware of the problem. On David’s site, linked above, the forums are devoted not only to his case but to many other kidnapping cases that are not nearly as high-profile. (Full disclosure: I am a member of the forums and have posted there many times.) The fact that his apparently ironclad case in a country that has signed the Hague Treaty is still being fought only indicates the lack of consistancy in such cases, as well as the overwhelming need in most of them to put citizens first rather than the best needs of the child. I am also aware some left-behind parents might despair over the case – if all that publicity and support hasn’t brought Sean Goldman back to the US, how will they succeed in getting their own children back?

Perhaps this is what Christopher Savoie was thinking when he decided to go to Japan and try to abduct his kids back. I do not like the idea of taking the law into your own hands in family abduction cases; it can only make matters worse. But on the other hand, he probably knew that he had no chance with the Japanese legal system. Japan has not signed the Hague Treaty, so the country doesn’t even need to make a pretense of trying to return kids. I know of only one case where a child was returned, and he did so on his own at fifteen. And in Japan one parent is expected to disappear after a divorce. (There is one case where a Japanese politician divorced when his wife was pregnant and has a son he has never seen.) Knowing all that, I can at least understand his motivations in trying a re-snatch. He tried to prevent his ex-wife from going to Japan in the first place but the courts said she could visit the country. He very well knew if she left there was a good chance she’d never return. Now he’s being charged with abduction, even though parental kidnapping is supposedly not a crime in Japan. Some have brought up the specter of “cultural relativism” in this case. While I accept that most countries do not share identical values, I am sure most will agree with me that ordering a parent to essentially vanish, and encouraging such behavior by not signing the Hague, is detremential to the child. Even under the idea of another culture’s values access to one’s child is a basic human right that should only be deprived if the parent is a threat to the child’s safety, which is not the case here.

He currently faces five years in jail. I don’t know if he will serve any of this, or will merely be deported. However, this could be the next face of the left-behind parent in the news. And with that could come the stream of publicity that may force Japanese law to change once and for all.

I posted the link to the article about the recovery of John Calhoun before, but didn’t read the comments until later.

And was stunned by this comment.

The FACTS are the mom & son did not have to come back. They did and that tells me there is more to this story. The article alone reads a mother was forced to relocate to 2 countries and cultures to keep her son safe. She is a great mom until the sperm side can prove her guilt.

Let me get this straight. The mom’s wanted. She turns herself in, and the dad is assumed to be the bad guy until shown otherwise? I know that when a mom abducts her kids, people will defend her more than a dad who abducts, but the outrageousness of this comment still stuns me.

After a few days of thinking, I hope that I can put my thoughts together on the death of Diana Alagha in a semi-reasonable manner.

When I wrote that Luna Fox had been found safe, I noted that she was found because she was treated for diabetes, and that the consequences could have been much more devastating if she had not been brought for treatment. This is the sort of thing I was afraid could happen. The story given was that Diana broke her arm, it was set badly, and she got an infection and died. Her father and his family are looking into this to see if it is really the case. If it is really the case, I wonder if she got any medical treatment at all, or if the bone was just set badly at home.

Many families of the missing say what is most difficult is hearing about accidents and disasters in other places and not knowing if their family member was part of this. But many of those families are ones who believe or suspect their family member met foul play. In family abduction cases, most assume their child is still alive. I usually think the same thing. If I had to guess at cases where the abducted child might be dead, I would first list the cases where child(ren) were abducted after a homicide. Cases with medical issues or a parent with a history of violence would be next. I certainly didn’t think Diana would be one of them. I wouldn’t have predicted when I posted she had been missing for thirteen years she had been dead for the past three.

I may not be able to do anything for Diana now. But if I use her death to work harder at helping other abducted kids come home, there will be fewer endings like this.