Vanished: When a parent takes a child

COURTNEY BRUMMER, Staff Writer
02/05/2005

EDITOR'S NOTE: This is the first in a two-part series about parental abductions.

The abduction of a child can be a parent's worst nightmare.

But what if the abductor is the other parent?

In 2004, there were 18 cases of children who were abducted by a parent, according to James Saunders, spokesperson for the Iowa Department of Public Safety. In 2003, 19 cases of children who experienced the same situation were reported.

According to the Iowa Missing Person Information Clearinghouse, there are currently three active cases in which children who were abducted by a parent or relative are still missing in Iowa:

- Corey Angle: Reported missing April 8, 1994, in Oelwein. Date of birth, Oct. 15, 1989. He would be 13 years old.

- Chione Brooks: Reported missing July 17, 2000, in Marshalltown. Date of birth, March 15, 1996. She would be 8 years old.

- Kimora Wright: Reported missing Oct. 28, 2004, in Des Moines. Date of birth, Jan. 8, 2004. She would be 1 year old.

If a parent or other family member takes, hides or keeps a child away from a parent with custody or visitation rights, then he or she may have committed a crime, the U.S. Department of Justice reported.

A study conducted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation concluded that in 49 percent of juvenile abductions, the offender is a family member, 80 percent of which are by a parent. In those instances 43 percent of the perpetrators are women, and in 84 percent of the cases the child or children are taken from their home.

In Council Bluffs, the situation is rarely reported.

Council Bluffs Police Detective Shawn Landon, who investigates crimes involving youths, said in the course of the last two years, there have been roughly three cases of parental abduction.

He noted that in Iowa, it's not illegal for a parent to take a child, whether that parent has custody or not, as long as the parent tells the custodial parent where they are with the child or where they are taking the child.

"Usually, a call can be made, and you can convince the person to bring the child back," he said.

It's a tricky call. Pottawattamie County Attorney Matt Wilber said Iowa Code has different definitions for different situations when it comes to the abduction of a child by a family member.

Iowa Code defines violating a custodial order as: "A relative of a child who, acting in violation of an order of any court which fixes, permanently or temporarily, the custody or physical care of the child in another, takes and conceals the child, within or outside the state, from the person having lawful custody or physical care."

In addition, "A parent of a child living apart from the other parent who conceals that child or causes that child's whereabouts to be unknown to a parent with visitation rights or parental time in violation of a court order granting visitation rights or parental time and without the other parent's consent," commits a serious misdemeanor.

"Basically, if you are a relative, it's a felony, if you are a parent it's a serious misdemeanor," Wilber said.

One resource available in Iowa and Nebraska for any type of abduction case is the AMBER Alert System. When it comes to parental abductions, however, the system is particularly gray.

In Iowa, the AMBER Alert plan is a "voluntary, cooperative program between law-enforcement agencies and local broadcasters to send an emergency alert to the public when a child has been abducted, and it is believed that the child is in danger of serious bodily harm or death."

Under the AMBER Alert, area radio and television stations interrupt programming to broadcast information about the missing child using the Emergency Alert System. While EAS is typically used for alerting the public to severe weather emergencies, it is also the warning system for civil and national emergencies.

The federal government requires all radio and television stations and most cable systems to install and maintain devices that can monitor EAS warnings and tests and relay them rapidly and reliably to their audiences.

The idea behind the AMBER Plan is a simple one: If stations can broadcast weather warnings through EAS, why not child abductions? The AMBER Plan provides law-enforcement agencies with another tool to help recover abducted children and quickly apprehend the suspect.

The purpose of the system is to provide a rapid response to the most serious child-abduction cases. When an AMBER Alert is activated, law-enforcement agencies immediately gain the assistance of thousands of broadcast and cable listeners and viewers throughout the area.

The plan relies on the community to safely recover the abducted child in hopes that the system will not only coerce a kidnapper into releasing the child for fear of being arrested but also deter the person from committing the crime in the first place.

In order to institute an AMBER Alert in Iowa, the following criteria must be met:

- Law enforcement confirms a child has been abducted.

- The child is under the age of 18.

- Law enforcement believes the circumstances surrounding the abduction indicate that the child is in danger of serious bodily harm or death.

- There is enough descriptive information about the child, abductor, and/or suspect's vehicle to believe an immediate broadcast alert will help.

In reference to the the third item of the criteria, the question of danger to the child is always one that law enforcement has to look at. Typically, people don't always assume a child would be in danger when they are with a parent.

However, that is not necessarily true, according to a 2001 study released by the U.S. Department of Justice's Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention on Risk Factors of Parental Abduction.

Among many conclusions offered in the study, it noted that such actions can, at its minimum, result in psychological damage to the child and, at its most horrific, could result in the child's death.

According to the study: "Mothers and fathers were equally likely to abduct. The abducted child's parent, usually in his or her mid-20s or mid-30s, almost always carried out the abduction, although the child's grandparent or stepparent occasionally was the abductor."

The study found that mothers were more likely to abduct when a custody order existed, whereas fathers were more likely to abduct when no custody order existed.

In addition, fathers were twice as likely as mothers to abduct in the absence of a custody order, according to the study and "it was discovered that fathers were much more likely to use force to abduct their children or to retain them by not returning them from a visitation, whereas mothers rarely used force to abduct their children.

"Instead, mothers were more likely to flee with the children or to deny the fathers visitation. These patterns of behavior reflect that mothers usually have physical possession of their children."

Most of the cases stem from domestic disputes. Because of this, Wilber said his office typically refers the cases to civil court unless there is sufficient evidence the child is in danger, a common practice in many jurisdictions.

"Parents are oftentimes looking to retaliate against each other," Wilber said. "This particular charge would be one that is rife for people to abuse. We don't want to be used as a tool in domestic disputes. So it really goes on a case by case basis."

That doesn't mean his office won't get involved at all, but there are many obstacles.

For example, a custodial parent takes the child from Council Bluffs to Kansas City. The parent notifies the other parent, who has visitation rights, that they are going to Kansas City. Rather than returning to Council Bluffs, the parent and the child disappear and no word is left of their whereabouts.

"You can still be the custodial parent and still be guilty of violating a custodial order," Wilber said. "At a certain level, it gets to a point where it is evident they are concealing the child's whereabouts and are in violation of the law."

By then, a child could be out of state and jurisdictional issues arise.

"If they get to Kansas City and decide they are not coming back, they are in another state," he said. "It's outside of my jurisdiction, so I would have to defer to their laws. However, that's not to say I have no resources here. Our best sanction that is always in place is contempt of court when they have violated that custodial order."

When that happens, an arrest warrant is issued for the abductor and entered into the National Crime Information Center that law enforcement agencies nationwide utilize.

Scars remain from parental abduction 30 years later

COURTNEY BRUMMER, Staff Writer
02/06/2005

EDITOR'S NOTE: This is the second in a two-part series about parental abductions.

In a report to the U.S. Department of Justice concerning parental abductions, Ernest Allen, president and chief operating officer of the National Center for Missing Exploited Children, addressed the question: "The kid is with a parent, how bad can it be?"

The report detailed just how dangerous a parental abduction can be, but it also analyzed the typical response to those types of abductions.

It's also an emotional question for a local resident. Jamie, who's real name is being withheld to protect her identity, was abducted by her mother when she was 11 years old.

Thirty years after the abduction, Jamie has fought hard to find peace with the events that occurred after she was pulled away from her father.

"You are not safer with someone just because they are blood relative," she said. "No one has the right to abduct someone else. Not even a parent."

Her parents divorced in 1972, when she was 8 years old. She lived with her mother and three brothers in Louisiana until October 1974.

"She called my father because she couldn't care for us," Jamie said. "The man she was with had been arrested for selling a 'green, vegetable-like substance.' My mother was working as a go-go dancer, and the speculation was that she was prostituting herself on the side to try and feed us."

Once her father, who lived in Omaha, had been called, Jamie's stepmother and maternal aunt drove to Louisiana to pick the children up. For more than a year, the children lived with their father and stepmother in rural Omaha where they attended a country school.

It was on Dec. 15, 1975, that Jamie's life would take a drastic, involuntary turn.

With a clarinet in one hand and a math book in the other, she and her younger brothers were waiting for the school bus at the end of the cul-de-sac where they lived when a white car pulled up.

"I didn't recognize my mother," Jamie said. "My eldest brother got out of the car. She had already picked him up, and he forced me into the car. I remember immediately telling my mother, 'I don't want to go. I want to stay with dad. I want to stay with dad. I want to stay with dad.' She promised she would send me back on a bus as soon as she got over the state line, and that didn't happen."

Jamie would later learn that her classmates from the bus stop informed their teacher of the incident when they got to school. The school notified her stepmother and father but, by then, it was too late.

"There was no Amber Alert back then," she said. "(Her father) didn't know which way she was going. My (father and stepmother) ended up filing bankruptcy a year and a half later because of all the money they spent trying to find us. But my mother kept moving us."

Jamie and her brothers would be moved from city to city and a total of five different schools over the course of the next year. At some point, her mother married again, to her half-brother, and they finally took the children to Woodland, Calif.

During that entire time, Jamie said she had no way to contact her father.

"We were not allowed to go near the phone," she said. "My mother knew that one of us would call Dad. The one time one of us did go near the phone - my middle brother - he was severely punished. He was beaten raw skin with a belt. We just knew that you did not (go near the phone)."

It was during that time that the situation became more terrifying as Jamie and one of her brothers became subjected to sexual assaults from her mother and stepfather.

"He used to tell us he was the son of the devil and my mother would laugh," she said. "We were abused spiritually. I was made to believe I was just a sexual toy for him. My mother would tell me my father didn't want me."

On her 12th birthday in November 1976, Jamie was allowed to have some school friends over for a slumber party.

"At that slumber party, my mother and this man showed a 'xxx' rated film," she said.

As horrible as the incident was, it opened up a dialogue that had not existed between Jamie and her friends about her life. One of her friends encouraged her to tell their teacher.

On Jan. 3, 1977, Jamie's mother took the boys to school and instructed Jamie that her stepfather would take her to school. Instead, Jamie was kept at home and raped repeatedly over the course of the day. To this day, Jamie said Jan. 3 serves as a reminder of what happened to her.

"The next day, I made an entry in my diary," she said. "My journal was kept in school. My friend came up to me and said she had talked to her ... I don't remember if it was her aunt or her grandmother ... but she advised me to talk to my teacher."

It was a prospect that scared Jamie.

"My teacher was a man," she said. "I remember starting to shake and cry. (My stepfather) had threatened to kill my father if I had ever told anyone, and this was a man I had watched beat my brother badly - that had beaten me badly. I can remember not doing the dishes and him taking a leather strap up and down my legs with shorts. I knew that he was an evil man."

Her friend would tell their teacher that day, who quickly approached Jamie about it.

"A lot of the schools had outside buildings, so we were sitting on a stump outside and it was a sunny day," she said. "It was probably 70 degrees, and I can remember sitting on the stump and I was shaking like it was freezing cold out. I remember telling him to just ask me questions because I couldn't talk about it. And he said to me that he was going to help me and that I didn't have to be afraid anymore."

After that, her teacher notified the local authorities who quickly began to investigate. Three days later, police officers came for her mother and stepfather.

"They came in and they immediately went right to him," she said. "And threw him against the wall and handcuffed him. I remember that my little brother was sleeping on my lap and he woke up. My mother walked down to find out what was going on and they arrested her also. My eldest brother, who was 15, came down and wanted to know what was going on. The officer said that they were being charged with sexual abuse against a minor and my brother just looked at me."

Jamie's mother and stepfather were each charged with 27 counts of lude and lascivious acts against a minor.

Following months of legal battles and trials, Jamie and her brothers were finally allowed to go back to Omaha to live with their father. Jamie's mother was convicted and would serve a term of five years in prison. Her stepfather was also convicted but rather than do prison time, he was deemed "mental sexual offender" and was placed into a psychiatric facility.

Her mother was never charged for abducting the children.

The experience caused many things to change for Jamie, her brothers and her family. When her father became an alcoholic, her stepmother made him check into rehabilitation. Jamie said he has been sober for 26 years.

"My dad was a casual drinker when we were growing up," she said. "My stepmother said when we were taken and they couldn't find us, it was hard for him. And then, when he found out what happened to us, I remember him coming to me in tears apologizing. He said, 'I'm your father. I should have protected you.'"

At first, Jamie said she had a hard time getting reacquainted with her father.

"I can remember him once saying that he wanted his little girl back," she said. "But it felt like that innocence was gone from me. The lap of a man was no longer a safe place. One night he came home, and he came to tuck me into bed; and I kicked him and started screaming."

Over the years, Jamie and her father's bond grew stronger as did the bond she shared with her stepmother.

She said she remembered an evening a few years after the abduction when a date pulled his car into their driveway and honked the horn for Jamie to come out. Rather then allow her to go, Jamie's father told her to stay.

"He told me, if you don't make men respect you now, they never will,'" she said. "He taught me something. After what had happened, I felt like damaged goods and he taught me I was worthy of respect."

Jamie suffered permanent physical damage as well. As a result of the sexual abuse, she would never be able to have children.

"There was a lot of tissue damage," she said. "I was so tiny, and he was a grown man. My husband and I tried for years, but there was too much damage. I blame my mother for the fact that I'll never be a mother myself."

After years of dealing with the demons of what happened to her, Jamie said she was able to forgive her former stepfather.

"I had to let it go because it was eating me up," she said.

On Jan 3, 1997, exactly 20 years to the day after the last assault, she met with her former stepfather, who apologized - in a way.

"His demented response was that he saw me as any other woman because 'I had the same parts,'" she said.

Forgiving her mother was harder to do, she said, because to this day her mother takes no responsibility for her actions.

"I have struggled to forgive her," she said. "She gave birth to me, and that is all she has. I'm much closer to my stepmother. When my mother dies, she'll be gone; and it won't be a big deal for me. I can only handle being around her for a short period of time. She's just not a good person. I rarely tell her that I love her because I don't know if I do."

Jamie eventually sought counseling, but the memories of her experience are still very much with her.

"There are times when it can be really bad," she said. "I have been in department stores, and when I heard a child cry, I immediately think, 'Are they supposed to be with that parent?' I have a much stronger reaction when I see an Amber Alert come on."

Amber Alert is a sensitive subject for Jamie. She said she celebrated the day it went into effect in Nebraska, and she is glad that other states have instituted Amber Alert programs.

Emotion caused her to pause, and she discussed it.

"If Amber Alert had been around when I was taken," she said, choking slightly from tears. "My life would have been so different."

So when someone says "The kid is with a parent, how bad can it be?" Jamie's response is quick.

"Even if my mother had some custodial rights to us, that gave her no right to terrify my father and us children ..." she said. "This has affected my life and will affect the rest of my life. And it all started with Mom taking us when she shouldn't have."

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