For the Lost Blog

I’ve been following the story intensely since I saw the news story where his mother claimed she had killed Gabriel. Now she is claiming that she gave him to some strangers in Texas. Her car was found, a bunch of baby items and a car seat still in it. Most importantly, she flat out stated she wasn’t concerned with whether he was dead or alive. At this point I’m convinced he’s dead.

As I said before, I didn’t want to see any stories like this this year. I didn’t even make it until the end of January. I won’t even hope there are no more. I suppose my cynicism is showing.

About Gabriel Johnson, of course. This thread started before his mother was found and the story got lots of attention

Direct quote from the thread.

I’ve never heard of a noncustodial mother who kidnaps her child harming the child.

Well, I guess you have now. *sigh*

This was exactly the kind of story I hoped I wouldn’t see in 2010.

Baby missing as mom spends Christmas in S.A.

The FBI is now searching for missing 8-month-old Gabriel Johnson.

His mother, Elizabeth Johnson, 23, was caught Wednesday in Miami after spending Christmas in San Antonio.

According to police, Johnson left Arizona with her son, but, she does not have custodial rights to him.

In the past, Johnson made threats to harm the baby. She lost custodial rights on December 28, 2009, when she failed to appear at a custody hearing .

So far, there have been no signs of Baby Gabriel since December 26. He was not with Johnson when she was arrested, and she refuses to say what she did with him.

Her car is also missing.

I really, really hope she just left him with a friend or relative. And they turn Gabriel over to the proper authorities. I don’t want to add another dead kid to the list I’ve got already.

I was recently made aware of the case of the missing child Jean Paul Lacombe. He was abducted by his father, Juan Lacombe Vega, which on paper sounds typical enough. However, his father got temporary custody by presenting the court with phony documents. And he had previously abducted his son to France after custody was turned over to his mother. That’s pretty brazen, but not totally out of the realm of possibility. When Jean Paul was turned over to his father, it was videotaped and he protested he didn’t want to go.

And now this case is being cited by the dubious “protective mother parent” movement as a case that somehow vindicates their theory that mothers who abduct only do so to save children from evil abusive fathers. Which is problematic in several ways. First, Vega didn’t win permanent custody in court; he got a temporary order which was rescinded the minute they found out he had used forged documents. Second, the only abductor in the case is Vega and he had a previous abduction under his belt. Third, there is no evidence I have seen that indicates the mother claimed abuse or that she was ever denied custody for reasons of “false abuse accusations.”

The case is a tragedy, and I wish for Jean Paul to be with his mother again as soon as possible. But if this case is supposed to somehow validate the mother-the-hero-abductor movement, it is doing so under shaky ground of their own theories.

Father reunited with daughter after mother leaves country with her

SAN ANTONIO — A Christmas miracle for a father who has been searching for his daughter for nearly two years. Nine-year-old Camille Kaufman, taken by her mother in 2008 in Boerne, has been found. She is finally back home with her father in their new home in Houston.

The search for her was a very long, grueling and emotional one. It took Galen and investigators all the way down to the jungles of Costa Rica. After months of investigating, Galen and detectives found Camille and her mother, Lynanne Foster, hiding out with her boyfriend, Lance Brauer, and his family.

This link was provided in a previous post about Camille. Both this and some articles written before Camille was found indicate that her mother was behaving strangely before her abduction and was worried about such things as “chips implanted in children.” That is a typical psychotic delusion, and while psychosis is not always present in abductors, some could very well have that affliction. I suspected from the first write-up I did of the case there was more to it than I knew; most parents who have a joint custody agreement that allows for essentially equal time and has gone on for several years, as Camille’s mother and father had, do not suddenly abduct their children. (And of course a lot of the comments seem to imply Mom did it for a good reason, despite the fact that her mother’s complaints were about the United States and not her ex-husband.) Apparently her mother remains in Costa Rica; she will be arrested if she leaves the country. I do hope that she does that, and not merely out of a desire for punishment; children need both parents in their lives if they are fit.

The untold tale of family abductions: Three girls missing, an international hunt

Christine Belford agreed to let her ex-husband take their three daughters to Disney World for a two-week vacation. In August 2007, the Delaware mother kissed her little blond girls goodbye.

Those two weeks were unsettling for Belford, then 34. The couple went through a bitter divorce in 2006 which resulted in joint custody of the children. Belford said when the girls were with their dad, they were always difficult to reach.

Two days into the trip, Belford connected by cell phone with her oldest daughter, Laura, then 5. Already homesick, chubby-faced Laura cried as her father checked them into a hotel room.

“I want to come home,” Laura pleaded with her mother.

But Laura and her sisters wouldn’t return to their Delaware home for 19 months.

Of course, to anyone who follows this blog, tales like this are hardly untold: they’re dealt with on an almost daily basis. The fact her kids lost weight and didn’t get medical treatment is also something I am no longer shocked by. The article mentions he’s facing thirty years in prison, but he’s also facing charges of bank fraud in addition to international parental kidnapping. He has thankfully pleaded guilty. And the eldest daughter is still dealing with issues from being told her mother was dead, which I predicted. My hopes for this bringing the problem of family abduction to the greater public is still there, but my realism tells me there will probably never be such a case.

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.

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.

Jack and Duncan Connolly.

Christopher, Daniel, and Richard Sanchez.

Diana Alagha.

And now I must add Mitchell Romero to the mix. He was abducted by his father, who had killed his mother. It was an accident, sure. He was in a car in Mexico that rolled over. But that doesn’t make it any easier to deal with.

This is too much to take. After all these dead children, why isn’t parental kidnapping taken seriously? What’s it going to take?

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.