‘Wild Ride’ Mom: She’d Do It Again to Save Son

When strangers are introduced to Madonna Jobst-Kennedy of Torrance they still say: “So you’re the one.”

Thirteen months ago, Jobst-Kennedy took a wild, 30-minute ride on the hood of her husband’s car to prevent him from taking custody of the couple’s 18-month-old son.

She survived sudden stops, screeching turns and speeds of up to 80 m.p.h. as Russell A. Jobst, his son riding beside him, tried to dislodge her from the front of his car.

Jobst-Kennedy’s tenacity was rewarded with the return of her son and national publicity. She has visited women’s groups and was a guest on a radio talk show. Her picture even appeared on the cover of a supermarket tabloid.

Jobst Pleads Guilty

Monday, she received another measure of satisfaction when Jobst, 44, pleaded guilty to two counts of assault with a deadly weapon and one count of child endangerment. She is expected to testify in Torrance Superior Court next month, when Jobst could be sentenced to six years in prison.

The couple was in the middle of divorce proceedings and fighting over custody of their son at the time of Jobst’s attack.

In an interview at her modest Torrance home, strewn with her son’s toys, Jobst-Kennedy recalled happier times with her husband as well as the harrowing incident that she said ended any hope of reconciliation.

“There are no winners in this case,” she said. “He’s still my husband. He’s still a person I know.”

Jobst-Kennedy, an airline flight attendant, and her husband, a pilot, met when they worked together on a 1980 United Airlines flight from Los Angeles to Fresno.

“He said he liked to cook, and I said, ‘We’ve got something in common, because I like to eat,’ ” she recalled.

On their first date, Jobst brought food to prepare dinner and a single red rose. “That’s what impressed me so much,” she said. “He grew it in his own garden.”

The two moved in together that week. “It was love at first bite . . . I mean sight,” said Jobst-Kennedy, a red-haired Australia native given to puns and one-liners.

The couple lived together for five years before they were married in 1985.

When they moved to Hawaii in December, 1986, the marriage had started to go bad, Jobst-Kennedy said. Three months later, she picked up her son and went to Los Angeles.

Jobst got a Hawaiian judge to give him custody of the boy, but his wife had a similar order from a judge in California. She had moved to Hermosa Beach and later into a small house in Old Downtown Torrance.

Jobst-Kennedy said she went to great lengths to keep her husband from finding her and taking the boy. She refused to accept any mail at her home address. She removed her name from a gas meter and removed her address numbers from the front of her house. And she drove to and from work in disguise.

But in July, 1987, she said, she made a mistake. She testified at a divorce hearing and failed to lose the private investigators who followed her home.

Jobst-Kennedy said that after being discovered, she considered moving but decided against it.

“I could keep running and move every two weeks or so,” she said, “but I decided to make a stand here.”

Last August, Toby Jobst was playing in his back yard in Torrance with a 10-year-old neighbor, police said, when his father grabbed Toby and put him into the front seat of a rental car.

Jobst intended to take the boy and fly to Honolulu, his lawyers said. But he was surprised by his wife, who he thought would be at work.

Jobst-Kennedy, who was told by the neighbor that a stranger was taking her son, said she never had any doubts about jumping onto the car.

“The day my son’s life is in danger and I sit idly by and don’t jump to his defense,” she said, “is the day I no longer call myself a mother.”