Child Stealing Just Adds to Divided Family’s Suffering

This is a story in which names really don’t matter, nor does place. Details may change, but the core remains consistently cruel.

Depending on who’s doing the talking, they call it parental abduction, or just plain child stealing. Some say that they are getting even, others that they are saving a life.

Here in Orange County, it happens about 1,000 times a year. No more than 30 such cases ever get as far as a trial.

Everyone gets hurt, and the blame always shifts. It was her; it was him. I was left with no choice.

When Charles Rothenberg ran with his son, David, from New York to Disneyland, he thought it better to kill the boy than to risk never seeing him again. If he couldn’t have him, then no one else should. Here, perhaps, extreme selfishness was the root cause.

Rothenberg’s plan went awry, of course. David survived, badly disfigured from his burns, and his father went to jail. Now Rothenberg’s out. Very few people know where he is.

Dr. Elizabeth Morgan accused her ex-husband, Eric Foretich, of molesting their daughter, Hilary. When the courts didn’t believe her, she secreted Hilary away, then spent two years in jail rather than tell a judge where her daughter could be found.

Morgan put herself above the law, but gained a good dose of moral authority when she did. Martyrdom has won many to her cause.

Foretich, meanwhile, says it was Morgan who was the molester, but it seems few people take this to heart. The courts will try, again, to sort it all out. Hilary has been found, in New Zealand.

The other day I met a little boy I’ll call Trevor, who is 4 years old, and his father, whom I’ll call Michael, in the Anaheim apartment where they both now live.

For a year, the face of this child, cherubic and full of warmth and cheer, peered from the posters of three different missing childrens organizations. When his mother took him, in September of 1988, he was 3 years old.

Trevor’s getting better now, his father says, but when San Bernardino County sheriff’s deputies found him, with his mother and her parents, the effects of a life on the run showed in most everything that he did.

“He had no motor skills,” Michael says. “He didn’t know how to climb on bars, or interact with other kids. Wah-wah was what he called water. . . . When someone would knock on the door, he would run and hide. . . . He would hide from policemen and if someone would come up to me and talk while we were near the car he would jump back inside.”

Trevor’s mother, who is scheduled to appear in Orange County Superior Court next month on felony charges of child stealing and defying a court order, has a different story to tell.

She served two days in jail and was released pending trial. Her parents, who pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of being an accessory to child stealing, have each served a week. They are on probation for two years.

“I’m agreeing that I held the child,” Trevor’s mother tells me. “I was right in the middle of going to court and I couldn’t pay my attorney. . . . I told her that I thought incest was going on, but she didn’t want to bring that into it. . . . I had every intention of settling this through the courts, but I could not afford it anymore. I felt I was pushed in a corner and that was the only decision I could make.”

Thousands of parents, for wrong or for right, make the same decision every year. They violate custody arrangements and take their child--which is also somebody else’s--and run.

In Orange County, authorities say, mothers and fathers commit this crime an equal percentage of the time. Allegations of child molestation, rarely proven, are rife.

“Every parent’s nightmare is that their kid disappears,” says Deputy Dist. Atty. Kenneth Chinn, in charge of Orange County’s child abduction unit.

“But when people hear about parental abduction, they tend to think that it’s not that big a deal. Yet it’s just a horrible experience. We have people call us on significant occasions, birthdays, Christmas, just crying into the phone. . . . The suffering just doesn’t end.”

Today, Michael, who works as a mechanical supervisor with a trucking firm, sprinkles his speech with legalese. He says that he has spent about 200 hours of research in the law library after he let his attorney go.

He says that after Trevor was missing, it took five separate visits to the Anaheim police station before he could persuade anyone to even take a report. He hired a private investigator. Later, when charges against his wife were filed, he went on scores of stakeouts by himself and with his cousins. He knocked on a lot of doors.

“You go through stages,” Michael says. “There are sleepless nights. You lose a lot of weight. You’re depressed and don’t want to get out of bed. I tried to get beyond that. I tried not to get into the hate and malice. I focused on what was best for the child.”

Then when I ask Michael about his ex-wife’s claim of child abuse, which authorities note was brought to their attention only after she was apprehended, he tells me that an accusation of murder would hurt him less.

“Nobody can ever recover from that,” he says. “Even when they prove that it is not so, people are always going to be wary of you. I can’t allow my 4-year-old son to crawl in bed with me because they could say that is child molestation. . . . Funny how they can do this with just an allegation and no proof.”

Later I ask Michael’s ex-wife whether she worries because her former husband now has complete physical custody of Trevor, if she isn’t afraid that incest might occur.

It was only last week that the court allowed her a supervised visit, for one hour, with her son. She hadn’t seen Trevor for six months.

“I think that (Michael) is wise enough not to mess with him right now,” she tells me. “He’s smart. He calculates too well. . . . I am sure he is going to keep his hands clean during this time.”

The U.S. Department of Justice and UC San Francisco are about halfway through a study, the first of its kind, that will gather data on how kidnaping, by parents and strangers, affects the children involved. Researchers say that they doubt it will turn up anything good.

“Any time a child is ripped away from a parent, there is trauma,” says Shirley Goines, one of the project national coordinators, who works out of the Adam Walsh Child Resource Center in Westminster.

Back in Anaheim, as I was getting ready to leave Michael and Trevor’s home, I walked to the back patio to say goodby to this little boy. He had been playing with a friend from next door.

“Daddy, I don’t want you to go to work. Please don’t go,” Trevor begins to cry. He grabs his father’s leg and doesn’t want to let go.

Then Trevor’s little friend looks up at me, shrugging his shoulders.

“He always does this,” he tells me. “He always cries.”