For the Lost Blog

I posted several weeks back about the case of four children abducted by their mother for the fourth time, the Riggs children. Today I read an article that stated they had been found safe.

Amber Alert ends with mom, children found in Washington

A woman who allegedly took her four non-custodial children, triggering a recent Amber Alert, was located tonight in Olympia, Wash.

Shirley Riggs is in police custody, according to a release from Independence police. Her four children — ages 7, 10, 12 and 15 — are safe and in protective custody.

I hope that this time she is not allowed more unsupervised visits at the very least. Ideally, she would serve jail time but with most parental abduction cases this does not happen. In any event I am glad the case is over. Hopefully I will not have to post that they have gone missing again.

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.

Tayna Brown to receive five years probation

The father of two girls who were abducted by their mother in 2005 reacted with outrage Tuesday to the punishment she received.

Or more precisely, the lack of punishment.

“Five years probation? C’mon,” Chuck Brown said Tuesday, after the no-jail sentencing of his former wife, Tanya Diane Brown.

Tanya Brown, who hid five abducted children for three years in a remote mountain home near Tehachapi, was sentenced Tuesday to five years probation with no jail time.

Sadly, this is all too common in family abduction cases. Even though the children are now far behind in school and didn’t get medical care while they were gone, the abducting parent usually gets away with a slap on the wrist. It is a tragic effect of the school of thought that the kid is with a parent and is therefore all right.