For the Lost Blog

Missing children from Louisiana found

Two children missing for the last two years were located Tuesday by deputies at a Star Valley home with their noncustodial mother, living under assumed names.

On Monday, the Gila County Sheriff’s Office received a call from the Webster Parish Sheriff’s Department in Louisiana who said they had been searching for the children, 14 and 11 years old, for the last two years, and they were believed to be in the Star Valley area with their mother, Barbara Collins.

The first case in the article was one where the children were found living in a tent with their mother, and the tent was scattered with drug paraphernalia. The second case is of the Collins girls, where there was concern the eldest girl, who has spina bifida, was not receiving medical attention. While I am somewhat surprised there were two family abduction cases found in the same area, the conditions are sadly something I am used to at this point. I hope all the children involved can now begin to recover from this situation.

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.

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?

Francisco Javier Andrade Vega is the name of an eleven year old boy that was abducted from Baja California in 2000 by a convicted child molester. He remained missing until this year, when he was found safe in Chicago. He had no identity papers when picked up by police, but he gave them his name and he was found in the FBI’s database of cases.

Let me repeat this. He was found safe. After nine years. Missing from a non-family abduction. And there has been almost no press about this. The articles I have found that gave the above details are Mexican papers; I can find no English sources. If I didn’t know Spanish those articles would be unaccessable. And I live in Chicago. And I have heard nothing.

I rarely go on tangents about missing children publicity. I have accepted that there is a heirarchy, and that most of the cases I get involved with – family abductions, people who just vanish, older non-family abductions – are not ones that burn up the pages. And not all of it is based on race. However, in this case I can make no other conclusion but being based on race. He was abducted for nine years, and it would have been easy for his abductor to kill him once he stopped being useful. He would then have become one of the many unidentified individuals that litter the police records. But none of this happened. Him being found safe is as close to a miracle as was Shawn Hornbeck’s case.

So, I ask, why haven’t you heard of him? Why hasn’t almost anyone?

Although this article about Luna Fox is over a month old, it is still relevant and I have several reasons for posting it.

Link to article

A Kailua-Kona man who spent much of the past three years in courts from Hawaii to the Netherlands attempting to regain custody of his daughter finally did so last month.

On Oct. 8, William Fox, 31, was informed by Dutch authorities that his 6-year-old daughter, Luna Fox, had been located and admitted to a hospital in Deventer, Netherlands, suffering from complications related to Type-1 diabetes.

Fox had not seen the child since December 2006.

This article is of interest for several reasons. One is that it shows the mindset of an abductor – the e-mails from Von Amstel insist on sole custody and full possesion of Luna’s passport. This indicates a desire for control of custody over anything else – while she tries to justify her actions in several different ways, ultimately she is not concerned with the overall welfare of her child. (There are also no claims of abuse, either then or now, so that can be ruled out as a motivating factor.) Second it shows court action, and the correct ruling. I have often said that if an abductor is a foreign citizen and they flee to their home country, they usually win over the non-citizen parent, a phenomenon I have dubbed “citizenship rule.” The third, most chilling aspect, is that of the circumstances of recovery. Luna was in school at the time and could receive treatment for type one diabetes when it was noticed. Type one is the kind that requires insulin injections and is typically more serious than type two. It is fatal if untreated. Had Luna and her mother been on the run and hiding, would her mother have recognized the signs and gotten treatment? Or would she have died in that time, or gone into a diabetic coma and been seriously harmed? This is a happy ending, but it brings the specter of a much darker one. I hope that I will not ever post a story of this type with a more tragic ending.

International abduction case has happy ending

An international abduction case came to a happy ending today.

Roberta Lima, along with her two daughters, Domminique and Pietra, all of Dover, arrived at Logan International Airport around 1 p.m. amid a flurry of friends and family.

With tears in her eyes, Lima said she can finally sleep at night now that her girls are back in her arms.

“When I got to American soil I finally felt safe, and that’s what this country is all about,” Lima said.

I am very happy about this, especially since citizenship rules apply in Brazil as much as anywhere else, and most of the time authorities won’t even look for the child if the non-custodial parent is a citizen of the country. She is a brave woman and I give all credit to the many who have helped her and kept her daughters from becoming possible cases on the For the Lost site.

Abducted Orland Park Girl, mother reunited

A 2-year-old Orland Park girl missing since Saturday and abducted by her father was reunited with her mother today after her father was arrested in Ohio shortly after midnight, Orland Park police said.

Said K. Ayesh was being held by Ohio State Police on an Illinois warrant for child abduction. Extradition procedures have begun, Orland Park police said. Two other adults were also taken into custody, police said.

The amount of things I am pleased with in this case are numerous. While I can’t be happy that the father abducted anyway, the amount of restrictions placed on him are what kept him from taking his child to Jordan and never returning. Since he is a citizen of that country, they would have made no effort to find him, much less arrest. The mother acted well and took many precautions, including private detectives trailing him. Parental kidnapping should be taken seriously and any threats should be looked on as warnings. I wish Nadin and her mother the best in upcoming days.

After finding the article I showed before on Jesse Griffin-Sebuliba, I decided I had to learn more about the case, and googled his name for some articles. Time magazine ran one very interesting one.

Sad End to Milwaukee Child Custody Case

The story details that he also has failure to thrive, osteopenia, and that the fractures (there were three, not two) look to be both old and not treated. Failure to thrive can occur in well-treated children, of course, but its presence requires a complete medical workup. Osteopenia is normally found in menopausal women. So it is not unreasonable to say Jesse was neglected.

But when I google his mother’s name, I find she has a legion of supporters. They support her accusations that the father is abusive and may take Jesse back to Uganda, his home country. However, when they do print the mother’s accusations about others, it becomes a bit clearer she is not fully sane. Among her charges is that the guards threatened to poison her food, which is why she stopped eating what they gave her and only ate snacks brought to her. Fear of being poisoned is one of the most common forms of psychosis, and the measures she took to avoid this “threat” seem extreme but what a sufferer might easily do in such a situation. Many of these supporters treat this as a reasonable charge, as if guards would want to poison a prisoner in jail for what is not considered by most a serious crime and they would have the means to do so and not get caught. The supporters all now have one thing they say in common.

That is, nothing.

Doctors have determined the fractures are old ones. The presence of his multiple malnourishment conditions indicate that Jesse was not well taken care of. If you claim the mother is the innocent in this case, you either have to rationalize this or accept that you were wrong. Apparently most have chosen to do the latter.

Any woman who abducts her child seems to develop a support network. While they are more visible nowadays due to the internet, many no doubt remember when Faye Yager tried to make herself as visible as possible on this issue not too long ago. I have spoken out about these women, and how I do not condone their actions, before. As a result, I have been accused of being biased against mothers (my being female nonwithstanding) or not doing my homework. The truth is, when a father abducts their child they rarely attract a large support network. I am sure there are a few people who do support them, but for the most part people assume that he’s done it to get back at the mother. (Frustratingly, very few seem to view it as a big deal for anyone, but at the very least they don’t assume he did it for a good reason.)

This is a picture of Jesse. Take a good look at him. The truth of family abduction can be conveyed in Jesse’s story. Let’s hope we are able to learn from it.