Given how skewed the courts are against men, plus the fact mom obviously didn’t try to find her kids until they practically knocked on her online door, I’m thinking they should give about 200% more weight to what the kids say than making some stupid “the law is the law” example of dad. Mom could have been an abusive, drunken, drug addled unemployed bitch and still gotten custody.
Nothing like an angry teenager to bring love an joy to a hitherto unknown parent. There’s a reality show I don’t want to watch.
That’s ridiculous. Her children were kidnapped and you’re saying she’s to blame for the fact that it took her fifteen years to find them.
So, you’re saying you sympathize with the father?
This problem has no good solution. The father, the only parent the kids ever knew, will go to jail. The kids will be uprooted and have to live with a woman who is a total stranger, while they are trying to sort out their teenage angst. It will be difficult for everybody from here on on. For the kids, it may have been better if she did not find them. But it is past that now. This is going to get uglier.
My immediate reaction is that the mother was irreparably harmed and the dad needs to go to jail at the very least to send a message.
But I don’t have much respect for court decisions in cases like these. Without more information, I don’t know who “morally” should have gotten the kids, if there was even a good way to decide. So really, I don’t see much moral difference between this case and a mother who is given custody and then leaves and hides with the kids.
Actually, the dad is probably more justified than such mothers, because he didn’t have the option of taking the kids and then not hiding.
Of course, this assumes that giving custody to the mother was not justified (maybe she was a drug addict having an affair with an abuser). In reality, based on the kidnapping I would guess that the decision was correct.
If you don’t like a law, you go through the ample legal routes there are to change that law.
If you have reason to believe that will not work, you engage in civil disobedience. This means you openly and publicly defy the law, and you openly and publicly accept the legal consequences. You hope that bringing the situation into the public light will lead to change.
What you don’t do is kidnap children and then hide like a criminal.
Another thought- while it’s wrong to assume the mother is automatically good, it’s also wrong to assume she is bad (a drug addict, abusive, etc.)
Perhaps the father is a religious fundamentalist and mother discovered atheism. Dad wants to make sure his children are not raised by an evil devil-worshiper.
Perhaps father is abusive, and mom decides enough is enough and leaves. Dad exacts the worst revenge he could think of. I have a friend going through this now. She left her abuser and now gets calls in the middle of the night along the lines of “You’ll pay for what you did. I’ll take the kids and make sure you never see them again.”
As for being happy, “happy” does not mean they are being raised well. I had a friend whose non-custodial father would beg her to visit. She refused, saying she was "happy’ with her mother. Yeah, she was happy because mom slept over at her boyfriends three nights a week, didn’t mind daughter’s pimply teenage boyfriend moving in, didn’t ask annoying questions like “are you going to go to college” and occasionally she could snort a line from mom’s stash when mom was passed out. She had no interest in spending time with her square old dad with his stupid rules.
I am assuming that the original custody arrangement that awarded her custody did leave him with access to the kids. There’s a world of difference between only seeing your kids on weekends and in the summer, and losing them completely.
According to the article, Mom did try an informal approach which did not involve the police. Another poster has criticised her for not going straight to the police. I am bemused by the suggestion she should have notified the kidnapper that he had been found and should flee again before the police were alerted.
I agree that a good outcome “just wasn’t going to happen” once the father kidnapped the children. If only he had been willing to settle for a smaller role in the kids’ lives, or talked to the authorities to justify a bigger role. That just didn’t happen.
That’s ridiculous. The father’s goal is to spend time with his kids. From his viewpoint, “kidnapping” the kids and bringing them up himself for 15 years was obviously preferable to trying to overturn the law (84% of custody battles in the US end with the mother gaining custody: the same ratio between fathers and mothers gaining custody as in 1994. Progress just isn’t being made.) which obviously is going to take a hell of a lot of time, by which he’s missed his kids growing up, or attempting to make a useless point which will only be used against him in a family court case.
I have a hard time demonising a father who concludes that family courts are a complete farce.
I don’t; he’s a kidnapper and should be punished to the full extent of the law.
Probably a small price to pay to see your kids grow up, from his viewpoint, to be honest.
Except during the summers, and on weekends, and major holidays, at school functions, and nightly phone calls. But basically, yeah. Her losing all knowledge of her kids for fifteen years is exactly like him losing legal custody.
Yeah, until the custodian decides to move. Or arbitrarily cuts off contact forcing the issue back into court which takes an age to settle etc.
What makes teenage kids happy right now is not necessarily what is in their best interests in the long run.
In this case, the kids have already been damaged by their father’s actions, even if they think they haven’t been. They have been robbed of a relationship with their mother; just as their mother has been robbed of a relationship with them.
This is bound to be a mess no matter which way it turns out – the father’s actions have guaranteed that. Even in Huerta’s ‘best case scenario’ of the father being allowed to maintain custody until the children are of age, this is going to be a devastating few years for these kids. We can’t (as a society) allow a kidnapper to escape punishment, even if punishing him means adding some extra pain to the lives of his kids – who are, as I said, bound to be pretty screwed up right now anyway.
There is no evidence that any of those things happened or were going to happen. How does the mother being in a position to possibly damage his relationship with the kids justify his certain destruction of her relationship with them?
But how do we know that the mother wasn’t genuinely the better parent and that’s why she was given custody?
Also, if the genders had been flipped and the mother kidnapped the kids from the father, would you be on her side? Or would the answer be that she must have been a terrible parent because otherwise the evil man-hating courts would never have given her custody?
I’m completely unable to join the lynching party that wants to hang dad. I’ve been through the family court farce. I had to spend many thousands of dollars and many trips to court *just to get *every other weekend and in the summer. What my c-word ex had in mind, and her scumbag lawyer doggedly pursued, was one afternoon (supervised!) per month. No overnights. No holidays. Zip. Nada. Nothing. They also had it in mind that, since I shouldn’t have the child during the summer, I should get a second job and pay her a higher amount of child support. Scumbag actively pursued that, too.
Now, they never even attempted to broach any hint of a whisper of an echo of a suggestion that I was abusive or neglectful or in any way a suboptimal parent. Why? Because I’m not and they therefore had no way to back up any such claims short of outright lying on the stand. But guess what? The court was still all cool with awarding my wife everything she wanted and turning me into her indentured servant. Hence, my huge legal bills just to be able to be some part of my daughter’s life.
Her posession of a vagina is apparently all that made her the better qualified parent. She was not a stay-at-home mother, so my daughter spent her pre-school days in a daycare exactly as she would have had to do if I had custody. No, wait, not quite. If I had been awarded custody she would have been in daycare right in the building where I work.
Best interests of the child? Legally family court decides what that is. In terms of reality, not legality, they couldn’t find their asses with both hands and a flashlight.
Oh, and by the way, for a long time following the divorce my c-word ex would just outright refuse to follow the court orders regarding my visitation rights. There was exactly fuck-all I could do about it. The police flatly stated they do not get involved in enforcing such orders and that I could go ahead and get lost. I made complaints to the family court through my lawyer. They sent her scumbag letters that essentially said “if you do that again, we’ll be forced to start thinking about maybe somewhere down the line possibly holding you in contempt of court.”
Family court can kiss my ass.
The 84% is a meaningless number without comparing it to how many households have the father as the primary child caregiver in the family. Is it that far out of whack from the number of households where the father is primary caregiver?
Add to that, the fact that it has been pointed out a number of times in here that not having primary custody /= not ever seeing your kids again.
He is a kidnapper. Having a BS justification to himself for that does not change it. If she was such as bad parent that he needed to kidnap his kids to protect them why did it not come out in court 15 years ago? Why is it not coming out now?