November 11, 2009
· Filed under Family Abductions, Located safe, Missing People in the News, Opinion
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.
November 10, 2009
· Filed under Opinion
I can’t tell whether it’s good or bad that I regularly get updates from a variety of left-behind parents who want to keep me informed about their case.
I can’t tell whether it’s good or bad that my entire facebook account is devoted to missing people, and I can tell you who every parent I’ve friended is looking for and details about their case.
I can’t tell whether it’s good or bad that when someone’s friend has their grandchild abducted, the friend who belongs to the same message board I do immediately messages me and asks for advice.
I can’t tell whether it’s good or bad that when any news story references a past parental kidnapping, I can usually tell who it is and what happened even if no details are given.
I do know, though, that it’s bad even with all the work I try to do, I still feel I’m running in place to keep up with the problem of parental kidnapping.
November 5, 2009
· Filed under Cold Cases, Endangered Missing, Located safe, Missing People in the News, Opinion
The missing infant Shannon Dedrick, whom I wrote about before due to her bizarre connection to the disappearance of Paul Baker, has been found safe. She was apparently under the bed of Paul’s stepmother (Susan Baker), in a box. The stepmother is being charged along with the mother of Shannon. I’m still not sure the mother was fully involved – both of Shannon’s parents are developmentally disabled, and it’s possible that the mother was hoodwinked in some way. After all, kidnapping is a far more serious charge than taking an abandonded baby or buying an infant.
I hope that there is some new effort to locate the remains of Paul with this new publicity.
November 4, 2009
· Filed under Cold Cases, Endangered Missing, Missing People in the News, Opinion
Very recently, a seven month old girl named Shannon Dedrick went missing from her Chipley, Florida home. A person of interest has been named, Susan Baker. And she is a suspect in the presumed homicide of her stepson, Paul Baker, who went missing in 1987. She sent a e-mail to several people claiming Shannon was in danger from her parents. (They are apparently both developmentally delayed.)
I don’t know if Susan Baker is being looked at because of Paul’s disappearance, or for some other reason, but it makes one of the strangest connections between missing persons cases I’ve seen.
October 30, 2009
· Filed under Missing People in the News, Opinion, Runaways
The New York Times has a featured article about runaways and the life they face on the streets. None of this is new information, of course. The facts that runaways are usually running away from some sort of serious problem and that they frequently engage in illegal activity to survive has been documented since the 70’s. Still, more coverage of the issue is needed as many still do not consider it a serious problem.
October 26, 2009
· Filed under Opinion, Website notes
The blog appears to be getting hits from a site in Polish. The pictures seem to indicate it’s about wrestling, but since I speak no Polish I’m not certain that’s the case.
If someone from there speaks English and Polish I’d appreciate knowing what that is all about.
October 26, 2009
· Filed under Endangered Missing, Opinion
This is a term I use, for lack of a better one, to describe the missing with no details. Sometimes it is over many years. Typically these cases are ones that I get a poster notice from NCMEC from and it merely says where the person was last seen. Occasionally it’s not even that – the poster for Bob Boyes has no text on it at all. There has to be more than what’s on the poster; the information about a scar and what he was last wearing aren’t on there but wound up on the Doe Network and the Charley Project anyway. Searches of news archives have yielded nothing about him. Aleacia Stancil is another. I’m fairly certain an infant can’t just vanish with no information. But I’ve found none. A few cases – Princess Perez, Rene Romero, and Skyla Marburger are some – have no details on the poster, but it’s still easy to find some information on what happened to them. (All three are probably dead: Princess and Rene killed by a parent, Skyla supposedly of natural causes.) Sometimes the poster gives a bit of information that is no help – Robert Bowling vanished with his sister, who has since been found. But who took them in the first place? Was she found alive or deceased? Jose Fuentes Pereira was only seven when he was last seen. One online source mentions he might be in New York, but he’s far too young to have left on his own. Could he be with a relative? He’s listed on the California Missing Persons Registry as a runaway, but that could be a clerical error. It’s not limited to very old cases, either. Sergio Rivera was only ten. Same issue; really too young to run away but no other details given to help.
These are not teenagers who may have run away; they are children under the age of ten. The information might be out there but not online, as in the case of the Matory sisters, Yolanda Williams, and Sir-Kristopher Marshall. Only Sir-Kristopher has family looking for him, and the circumstances were sketchy until I called the investigating department and asked what was going on. Unfortunately, I can’t do that in every single case I wonder about. Hopefully an article or other information will pop up on the case as it often does.
October 17, 2009
· Filed under Family Abductions, Missing People in the News, Opinion
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.
October 4, 2009
· Filed under Family Abductions, Missing People in the News, Opinion
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.
