Abusive American dad abducts daughter, but Mom has retrieved her now--from Chinese orphanage where he abandoned her (Staten Island, New York)

You really have to read this story yourself to fully appreciate what this mom had to go through to retrieve her daughter, who had been kidnapped by her husband, RODRIGO KAROLYS. Dad had a history of abuse; in fact, after the kidnapping, mom found his on-line journal describing his lies and drug abuse. He also threatened on-line to kill the mom if she looked for the child. One point, when Mom actually located the Dad, he threatened Mom and the Mexican official that was with her with knives.

So was Daddy motivated by more together-time with his little daughter? Nope. He abandoned her in an orphanage. He just didn't want Mom to have her. Very typical behavior of an abuser. Love had nuthin' to do with it.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/31/nyregion/31kidnap.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&th&emc=th


Family Fights Odds, Retrieving Kidnapped Girl

By NINA BERNSTEIN
Published: October 30, 2009

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.

Over the next nine months Ms. Karolys, 24, would have many despairing days as she searched for her abducted child, but the terror of those first hours was an abyss. “I was utterly lost,” she said.

She had no money and spoke no Chinese. In the United States, she and her family on Staten Island were illegal Mexican immigrants. Yet unless they turned to American authorities for help, her child would be gone forever.

Her husband, a native-born American citizen who grew up in New York City and Woodstock, N.Y., boasted in an online journal filled with anti-Mexican slurs that she would be helpless to fight the abduction, one of dozens of international parental kidnappings that take place each year. But he underestimated his wife, her family and the law.

In the end, it took an extraordinary international effort, including months of legal and diplomatic advocacy, criminal investigation and Internet sleuthing, to locate the child — who was found on Sunday, abandoned in an orphanage many miles from Beijing — and bring her safely home to New York. She and her mother arrived at Kennedy International Airport on Thursday night, amid balloons and tears.

Mr. Karolys, 30, is being held without bond in the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn and has not yet entered a plea to federal charges of international parental kidnapping. He was arrested at Newark Liberty International Airport on Oct. 22, after border officials saw he was wanted on federal and state criminal warrants in New York and Wisconsin. His lawyer, Michael Weil, would not comment.

Even as Mr. Karolys was being deported from China because his visa had expired, his wife secured a green card under immigration law that allows the abused spouse of a United States citizen to apply for legal permanent residency.

“The victory is so sweet, but it’s bittersweet,” said Carolien Hardenbol, a lawyer at Sanctuary for Families Legal Center, a nonprofit agency enlisted in New York by Ms. Karolys’s sister. “If this had not been New York City, in a city that has a supportive policy for immigrants, this never would have happened.”

The major players included Sanctuary’s multilingual team of lawyers, the Mexican consulate in Beijing, the State Department, Senator Kirsten E. Gillibrand of New York and a Chinese private investigator hired with the life savings of the mother’s family on Staten Island. But the first big step came on Feb. 4, when Ms. Karolys’s older sister, Daniela Guzman, frightened but determined, walked into the Manhattan headquarters of the F.B.I. without an appointment.

“I knew someone from the family had to ask for help,” said Ms. Guzman, 26, who had been studying for a master’s degree in special education but withdrew to devote her time and tuition money to the search. “I had to do it for my niece — she’s an innocent baby. I thought, if they have to kick me out of the country to bring my niece here with my family, then so be it.”

Maria E. Johnson, an agent on a special F.B.I. squad that investigates crimes against children, did not question her immigration status, Ms. Guzman recalled. But she warned of the many obstacles ahead.

The mother needed an order of sole custody from a family court before authorities could pursue the child’s father for parental kidnapping — a hard task since she was stranded in China. Moreover, China has not signed the Hague convention on international child abduction, and does not enforce custody orders issued by foreign courts. Nor does it consider parental abduction a crime.

The private lawyers Ms. Guzman contacted had offered her no hope, she said. But her reception was very different at Sanctuary for Families, where Shiao Chien Lee, one of 25 staff lawyers handling cases of domestic violence victims, pursued the custody case in Family Court on Staten Island, while others worked on the application for Ms. Karolys’s green card.

In China, Ms. Karolys said, the Mexican consulate took her under its wing, finding her a cheap place to stay and a computer she used to search for clues. Her sense of urgency reached a new pitch about a month after the abduction, when she discovered a Web site called “Rodrigo Karolys’s LiveJournal” where since 2001 Mr. Karolys had periodically vented his anger, described his own lies, sexual relationships and drug use, and crowed about fleeing the police in America.

“That’s when I realized I didn’t know him at all, and I had to rescue my daughter from him because she was in danger,” said Ms. Karolys, who came to the United States at age 11, met her husband in 2004 and married him two years later.

A Feb. 11 posting, which became part of Ms. Karolys’s affidavit in support of her petition for custody, said: “I ran away with my daughter when we were in Beijing. I just couldn’t let her grow up to be a lazy worthless waste of space like her mother.” He added, “I sent my kid to live with her new mom in another city.”

Ms. Karolys had no idea who this “new mom” was, but in New York, her sister combed the Internet to find out. In March, she discovered YouTube videos and MySpace photos that Mr. Karolys had posted of Lenora with his Chinese girlfriend, and matched the woman’s image to that of a fellow teacher at Mr. Karolys’s school. She also found his Jan. 29 Craigslist posting for a baby sitter in Shanghai, and sent everything to the F.B.I.

Discouraged by all the delays, Ms. Karolys’s parents, who are housekeepers, went into debt to hire a private investigator in China. He provided surveillance photos and an address outside Shanghai, where Ms. Karolys, accompanied by a Mexican consular official, Tadeo Berjon, showed up on April 17, despite opposition by the United States Embassy and the New York lawyers.
“When confronted, Rodrigo attacked both Olivia and the Mexican Embassy official with two knives, one in each hand,” the Sanctuary lawyers wrote in a summary of the case. The Chinese police arrested everybody, then let Mr. Karolys go, saying that no harm had been done.

Lenora had not been found, and the effort had backfired. The family’s low point came when they read Mr. Karolys’s May 23 posting, now part of the criminal complaint against him. “Lenora is hidden so well that even I don’t know where she is,” he wrote, cursing Olivia, and threatening: “If she ever turns up at my place of business or residence again, I will kill her in cold blood. I don’t care if the cops are watching. I don’t care if I go to jail. If I can’t raise Leno, then the secret of where she is will die with me.”

But the necessary custody orders were issued in May. Reluctantly, in August, a dispirited Ms. Karolys came back to New York without her daughter on a grant of humanitarian parole so she could be interviewed for her green card.

On Oct. 1, the F.B.I. agent called with the first piece of good news: A warrant had been issued for Mr. Karolys’s arrest, and his passport had been flagged. On Oct. 23, the day after his arrest, the State Department called. The many photos they had disseminated around China had borne fruit: Officials at an orphanage had called about a child who might be Lenora. That day, the mother’s green card arrived in the mail, and she was able to use it to get a visa back to China.

She barely made a midnight flight. When she landed, embassy and State Department personnel were waiting to put her on another plane. A two-hour flight, an hour-long taxi ride and there, in an orphanage with 200 Chinese children, Lenora was waiting. The mother learned that an elderly baby sitter had called the police, who took the child to the orphanage after Mr. Karolys and his girlfriend failed to show up.

Orphanage officials said that a Chinese woman, holding Lenora’s stolen passport, had tried to claim her only hours after the State Department asked them to keep the child for her mother.
“I feel so blessed,” Ms. Karolys said early on Friday at her home on Staten Island as Lenora slept in her arms.