For the Lost Blog

Mother and daughter reunited after twelve years

After 12 years of losing her daughter to international abduction by the child’s father, Janet Greer’s moment finally arrived.
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With anchorman Chris Cuomo from “Good Morning America,” at her side, Greer entered her daughter’s world today. It was one she’d been cut from for a dozen years, because Sarah “Dowsha” Elgohary’s family refused to let Greer to see her own child.
The Egyptian courts and leaders refusing to intervene on Janet’s behalf.

Finally, the day she’s dreamed and fought so hard to see materialize, has dawned.
Greer went to Egypt, where she saw her daughter today.

I find it interesting that as soon as Sarah learned her mother was not dead she wanted to see her. I have speculated that if an abducted child is told the parent is dead they are more open to a reunion when the opportunity presents itself. If the left-behind parent is still known to be alive, the abductor must present alienating circumstances that justifies the kidnapping instead of letting the child think the parent is dead and reunion impossible. I have no way of looking at this empirically of course. Stories like this one are what makes all the sweat and toil poured into family abduction cases worth it.

Boy Abducted by Father in August

An 8-year-old Burlingame boy allegedly abducted by his father in August and taken to Mexico has been reunited with his mother, a police sergeant said Thursday.

Maxim Yu’s father Jason Yu was supposed to meet Maxim’s mother in Detroit on Aug. 19 but never showed up with the boy, according to Burlingame police Sgt. Ed Nakiso.

Maxim’s mother then notified authorities, including the Burlingame Police Department. For months Maxim remained missing until the state department received information he was in Mexico, Nakiso said.

His mother traveled to Mexico where she and Maxim were reunited. They returned to the Bay Area on Saturday, according to Nakiso.

While Mexico is a popular destination for abducting parents, in this case it was a very bad choice. Two people of Chinese descent in Mexico are going to be very noticeable. I’m happy they did not go to Taiwan like expected, because the chances of Maxim coming home then would be about zero. I wish he and his mother the best in re-adjusting.

I just received this notice from NCMEC.

Dear Poster Partner:

It is with great sadness and deep regret that we notify you that Duncan & Jack Connolly missing from Bloomington, IL, has been located deceased. Please discontinue dissemination of this poster.

Please remove and discard any posters on this case that you have placed in public view.

We greatly appreciate your part in our efforts to reunite families and look forward to your continued support.

Thank you for your support.

A family abduction. Another set of dead kids.

But it’s okay. They were with a parent.

NCMEC has recently changed the wording on their family abduction cases, from “abducted by non-custodial (relative)” to “allegedly abducted by (relative).” If it said “in the company of non-custodial (relative)” it now has removed the non-custodial bit. It’s a change I can understand. Defenders of parental abductors can get vehement, and I suspect this was related to lawsuit threats.

Doesn’t mean I like it, however. I don’t. I will continue to use “non-custodial” on the For the Lost site. If I find out there was no abduction, I’ll say that. However, I think that wording NCMEC has now takes away from the cases, as ninety-nine percent of the time there is no doubt whatsoever an abduction by a parent occured.

Go ahead, try to sue me for it. When your lawsuit gets dismissed (when, not if) I will countersue and you will be sorry. You have been warned.

Police say woman used different names, Social Security numbers

A Seacoast business owner has been arrested and charged with being on the run from crimes she allegedly committed in Arizona 12 years ago.

Police said Danielle Bascom, 50, was difficult to track down because she uses six aliases, three birth dates and four Social Security numbers. Investigators said she is also known as Paula and sometimes uses the last names Bruno, Bryce and McClain.

This is the only article I could find about Darlene Tolbert, and it’s about her mother and not her. It mentions the case was dropped, but nothing about where her daughter is now. I will keep looking but doubt I will ever find more information.

Recently there were two recoveries in family abduction cases not on the For the Lost site, those of Anna and Hopi Gray, twins abducted by their mother from Arkansas, and Karen, Laura, and Leigh Matusiewicz, abducted by their father and grandmother from Delaware. In both articles I have provided links to, there are comments on them. In both cases, a commentator insinuates that the parent must have had a good reason for running off. But in the Matusiewicz article, those people are far outnumbered by the ones who say the dad is scum and should be punished for his crime. I agree with the majority of commentators there. Their father was actually telling people that the girls’ mother committed suicide, and was not working where they were found in Nicaragua. I’m grateful they were found before the girls could fully grasp the implications of a death by suicide – suicide by a parent is known to be detrimental to the child, and if years passed and their mother who “killed herself” suddenly reappeared alive the psychological effects would be devastating.

And in the Gray article? Well, you probably have already guessed that most people say she must have run off for a good reason. The kids were found living in a van, filthy, and couldn’t tell the police when they had last eaten. While those conditions are fairly bad, I sadly accept them as one of those things that are all too common in these cases. But several of the commentators say, essentially, “I know it looks bad, but she might have had a good reason to do so…” With the circumstances they were found in, one might think that it was obvious they were not being protected from anything. And it’s still assumed. Because the abductor has two X chromosomes.

Am I one of the few who finds this deeply disturbing?

There are a few long-standing cases that involve a child missing with a parent that are not on the For the Lost site. In many circumstances, I will label such a family abduction. What makes them ruled out?

In some cases, insufficent evidence exists to determine whether there was really an abduction. El-Jahid Allah, for example, was last seen with his non-custodial father, but I can determine nothing besides that. For all I know, they were homicide victims. So unless a warrant is issued for his arrest, I will leave it off. Maribel Oquendo-Carrerro is listed in a few places as abducted by her father, but on NCMEC she’s just listed as endangered with no message about the dad. Once again, unless there is proof provided, I can’t put it up. In Kayla Rosa’s case, I can’t even figure out what parent she was with, or if they have since been found. (Sites have listed both her mother and her father as the parent she was last seen with.)

In some others, I doubt it was a family abduction at all. James and Ptah Diamond, for example. Ptah was visiting his father in Arizona at the time; he normally resided in Cleveland. Researching the case online one day, I came across a post by James’ mother that detailed suspicious circumstances in the case. It’s possible both will turn up, but I doubt it. I’d like to be proven wrong. (The post was on a web site that has since vanished and I’ve never found another copy, however I remember most of the details.)

Some past cases I left off the site because I believed the parent abducted the kid to kill them. The Porter kids, for example. I was proven right. I wish I wasn’t, but in that case they did not qualify.

I added a part to the FAQ section in our site about cases like that. I mentioned that in the unlikely event that the “abductor” was actually along with their child a victim of homicide, I would resolve the case with a note to that effect if found and merely remove with the note if suspicious circumstances came up. I named a specific case there (Paul and Sarah Skiba) but when I wrote it I was actually thinking of a particular case. It’s since been resolved and I feel free to name it now. That case was the one of Joseph Kennedy. I treated it as a family abduction and the only evidence to the contrary was the mother’s family insisting foul play was possible. They created a sliver of doubt in my mind, and I added the note to that effect. Of course, it was an abduction, Joseph and his mother were both fine, and they were found in Mexico. I’m still keeping it up there, though. I could stil be proven wrong.

Please note sarcasm.

This wonderful jewel of a website, run by parental kidnapper Emmanuel Lazaridis (who has posted on this blog before) says she was never missing because – get this – her mother knew where she was. By this standard only a few people are missing, because I would say in ninety-nine percent of the cases of missing people at least one person knows where they are, even if they don’t say.

I will also note that he apparently sent a sixty-three page lawsuit to a paper that reported her disappearance and her mother’s search. I eagerly await my own sixty-three page lawsuit. I hope he also gets one from the real NCMEC site as he has copied their source code without permission.

On the For the Lost web page is the excellent essay by Meaghan Good, The Middle Eastern Abduction Myth. It is still unfortunate that the myth that most parental abductors are Middle Eastern males persists. I was curious how this applied to our site specifically. What percentage of cases possibly involve the Middle East, and do the gender ratios seem unbalanced?

For this I looked at all 375 cases on the site. The only ones included in this sample were ones taken or possibly in the following countries: Egypt, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Qatar, Kuwait, Yemen, Oman, Jordan, United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain. While Iran is technically a Persian nation and not a Middle Eastern one it is considered as such by most of the population and thus it has been included. Turkey was excluded for being considered a European nation and both Afghanistan and Pakistan were excluded for being Asian nations. Twenty three cases met this criteria. Of those, seventeen involved fathers and six involved mothers. So while it appears that fathers are more common abductors amongst children taken to Middle Eastern countries, the total of children taken to them is a small amount compared to the whole picture.

In 1983, Sally Abrahams published the book Children in the Crossfire – the Tragedy of Parental Kidnapping. It is unfortunately still one of the only comprehensive books on the subject. I wrote a brief review of it, which I will post below.

This book was written in 1983, but much of the information in it is still useable. It was the first nonfiction work to examine the problem of parental kidnapping, and it remains one of the few today. Abrahms tells the stories of families and their missing children, their searches and the lingering effects afterward. Those stories are simliar enough to many told today, and in a way that is the most heartbreaking part. Some of the advice is outdated, but most is still applicable. If you are in a family abduction situation today, or just want an overview of the problem, this is still the best book on the subject.

What I did not address in the review is the fact that many things have changed that the book addresses. What are those, and how many things are still the same?

The most obvious and pronounced difference is the reaction of law enforcement to family abduction cases. In 1983, a parent still had to do all the leg work to find a missing child. When the police did take a report (many did not as it was viewed as a family matter and not a crime) that was often it. Now law enforcement takes reports and enters them into the National Crime Information Center database right away. Parental abduction is a felony in almost all states, and kidnapping warrants are issued as soon as possible. The book also mentions at the time FBI Unlawful Flight to Avoid Prosecution warrants were nearly impossible to obtain for this crime. Now not only are they regularly issued, but the FBI web page has one section strictly devoted to featured abductors.

The second change is in technology. Age-progression software has helped recover children missing for long periods of time. The Internet provides a quick resource for anyone who thinks that a child they know may have been abducted. Many stories now say that a person thought the situation was odd, went online and looked up missing children, and found said child. In the past, even if someone was suspicious there was no way to check if they were missing, which could lead to a successful recovery. The Amber Alert system that is activated for missing children who are believed to be in danger is another new advance that helps to recover children. The NCMEC had not been formed at the time of this book, and is now the resource for most or all of the technologies above.

Unfortunately, many things she addresses are still the same. International abduction is still a situation where children are rarely recovered. Most countries will not deport a citizen in an abduction case, and the Hague Treaty is often invoked but rarely put into effect. A father in the book states that short of actually chaining your kid to you, you can’t prevent this, and this is still sadly the case. The motviations of the abductors are still the same, giving all sorts of reasons why their abduction was justified when in reality it is anything but. And the attitudes of others are often still that it can’t be that bad if the kid is with a parent. Despite the recognition of parental abduction as child abuse, and legislation passed thereof, most people who are not in law enforcement refuse to see it as a problem. This is one reason why a new book on the subject is needed; Abrahms covers the problem well even for today, but much of it is out of date and the book itself is no longer in print. Hopefully someone will fill that need someday.