For the Lost Blog

I have said many times that parental kidnapping is child abuse, there is no excuse for it, and that abductors are motivated out of selfishness and greed rather than the well-being of a child. Cases like this come along and prove it for me.

Woman at center of custody dispute arrested

A woman who spent eight months in jail for refusing to disclose the whereabouts of her infant son has been arrested, and the child — missing for more than a year — was recovered after a confrontation in which police were forced to Taser the woman in order to release the child from her grasp.

The boy, now 2, is in the custody of the Bureau of Milwaukee Child Welfare and is expected to be reunited with his father within the next few days, according to Legal Action of Wisconsin attorney DeAngela Ellis, who has represented the father in the custody dispute, which has lasted nearly the boy’s entire life.

I will note part of this story is incorrect – the woman was not tasered until the child was taken away from her. His name is Jesse Griffin-Sebuliba, and the article now says he has rickets and two fractures, but is expected to recover. Since he was listed as an endangered missing child and I had no other knowledge of the case, I did not think to include him on the site. (Another case, with even more tragic circumstances, I did eventually find out and include the child, Jessica Vargas Biatriz, on our site. She is sadly still missing.) Rickets is a condition caused by lack of vitamin D, which can be obtained from sunlight and fortified foods such as milk. Dark-skinned children are more susceptible to it in the winter months, but even so it is not usually a problem in developed countries except in cases of malnutrition, as many foods are fortified with the vitamin. Whether his bones broke because of rickets, physical abuse, or a combination of both, I am not sure. There is no excuse for this type of behavior. The mother was obviously more concerned about spiting the father than about caring for her child. I have seen in a few other abduction cases children abanoned to strange relatives by the parent, in some cases not even in their home country, as well as a case where children were dropped off by themselves by the Mexico-Texas border to cross by themselves! They were thankfully found by Border Agents who said they were trying to dig under the fence with their bare hands.

If you think this is not a serious crime, please read this case, read other cases, google names like Adam Haseeb, Deirdre Crowley, Luis Cisneros, and Ronald Simmons and see if you can still say that. I highly doubt you will.