How Was a Mother Treated

Sidebar:
How Was a Mother Treated
When She Kidnapped Her Child?

January 16, 2001

After a mother kidnapped her six-year-old girl from the father, she was discovered by the FBI and local police in Greenfield a few months ago. She had kidnapped the youngster over a year previously from the state of Washington. Unlike this case, it was not reported in the Boston papers for even one day, much less on the front-page for many days.

What did the Massachusetts courts do to that kidnapper?

They put her under bail of $200. They put the father under a restraining order as soon as he arrived in the state because the judge said that he would expect he would be angry if he were in that situation. They gave the child to the DSS, not to the father.

The father was forced to sit around for about a week before a court finally gave him back his child for whom he had legal custody.

But the child did not return to Washington with her father. The DSS decided to return her to Washington authorities rather than to her natural father who has legal custody and who had flown to Greenfield to get the child. This raised many eyebrows because no one could conceive of keeping a child from its mother if the tables had been reversed.

The mother merely jumped bail and never returned to the court.

One can only imagine what this disoriented and frightened child must have felt during the week that she was in DSS custody.

A group of about twenty from a local battered women’s shelter, NELCWITT, attended the court sessions with their children in order to provide support for the mother.

There was a felony warrant for the mother’s arrest from the state of Washington and a warrant for “Unlawful Flight to Avoid Prosecution” from the federal government. The FBI and local police located the woman and child in Greenfield after a neighbor grew suspicious and called the police. The girl’s hair had been dyed and her name had been changed. She was not enrolled in school.

Fathers groups were upset that Judge Philip Beattie from Springfield released the mother on $200 bail when she was first apprehended, saying that she is “not a flight risk” even though she had done so before.

The mother is said to have abandoned the child, father and home about four years previous to live in Hawaii and Arizona with a cult-like group that is polygamous. Before she left and after she returned from that venture, she constantly accused the father of sexually abusing the girl. But many checks by authorities have failed to uncover any evidence of abuse.

The father was awarded temporary care, custody and control of the child in August 1999. The mother was restrained from going near the child or the father. But the mother kidnapped the child after that decision.