Parental Abduction – Texas girl rescued in Mexico after missing for 12 years

October 1 , 2014

Source: abc7news

A Texas girl who was abducted and missing for 12 years was rescued Tuesday morning near Mexico City.

LEFT: Sabrina Allen pictured before she went missing 12 years ago. RIGHT: A photo of what Sabrina might look like today. (National Center for Missing and Exploited Children)

Sabrina Allen was four-years-old when she was abducted in 2002. Now 14-years-old, Allen was rescued in an operation conducted by the Mexican Federal Authority, FBI and U.S. Marshals. Sabrina and her alleged abductor, Dara Llorens, were flown back into Houston, TX on Tuesday night. Sabrina now is undergoing medical evaluation at an undisclosed facility in Austin, TX.

LLorens is Sabrina’s non-custodial mother, and was sought under a federal warrant for allegedly kidnapping her daughter after divorcing from her husband, Greg Allen. Allen made the following statement in a press release after hearing of Sabrina’s rescue.

“I am overjoyed that Sabrina has been found alive and is safe. Our entire family would like to thank the investigators that made this happen. Our prayers go out to the Mexican Federal Police Officer who was injured. We also would like to thank the Mexican Government for their cooperation in this case. Last, a heartfelt thank you to the USFBI, US Marshals, and all of the investigators that have worked this case for the last 12 years. They never gave up. We look forward to being reunited very soon.”

According to reports, Llorens and her daughter were able to avoid capture by changing their hair color. Llorens was booked into Travis County Jail in Austin, TX and is set on a $300,000 bond.

Authorities are scheduling a news conference later this afternoon to discuss the rescue and arrest.

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Amnesty Int’l: Disappearances in Mexico a ‘Crisis’

June 5 , 2013

Source: ABC News

Amnesty International: Kidnappings in Mexico a ‘Crisis’

The number of unsolved disappearances in Mexico constitutes a national scandal and a human rights crisis, Amnesty International said Tuesday, citing what it called a systematic failure by police and prosecutors to investigate thousands of cases that have piled up since 2006.

Rupert Knox, Amnesty’s Mexico investigator, said relatives are often forced to search for missing loved ones themselves, sometimes at considerable risk.

Adding insult to injury, Knox said police and prosecutors often don’t even bother to use the information that relatives dig up. Instead, police routinely assume that the missing are caught up in Mexico’s drug cartel conflicts.

“They are stigmatized, they are treated with disdain, and the typical thing is to say the victims were members of criminal gangs,” Knox said. “That is a demonstration of the negligence that has allowed this problem to grow into a national scandal and a human rights crisis.”

The federal government says some 26,000 people have been reported missing since the government launched an offensive against drug cartels in late 2006, though officials have said the true number is probably lower, because some people reported missing have since been found or accounted for but never taken off the list.

Brenda Rangel is the sister of Hector Rangel, who disappeared along with two friends in 2009 after being stopped by police for a traffic violation and was never seen again. She is sure her brother wasn’t involved in criminal activity. A young businessman, he had gone to the northern state of Coahuila, which is a hotbed of the Zetas drug gang, to collect a payment from a client.

Rangel says her brother last called to say he was in police custody, and she said the family has given authorities the number of the squad car, and even the names of the policemen involved in the detention. But she said prosecutors told her the officers were fired from the local police force in Monclova, Coahuila, and couldn’t be located. In Mexico, it is not uncommon for local policemen to work for drug gangs.

Nearing the fourth year in her brother’s disappearance, that kind of shrugging response is driving Rangel and her family to desperation, and into danger, since they can’t let it rest.

“We have received death threats,” she said, adding: “I have run risks, I have gone into safe houses, I have had to disguise myself in different ways to look for my brother.”

One by one, other parents and siblings of missing Mexicans stood up and recounted their horror stories: cases in which authorities themselves, police or the military, appear to have been involved in the disappearances.

Mexico’s government announced last week that it is creating a special unit to search for missing people. But the unit has only 12 federal investigators and a group of federal police agents to cover all the cases.

Knox said such agencies have been tried before in Mexico but have accomplished little, in part because they have lacked the resources, manpower and authority to really perform their task.

“The authorities have always seen them (the special units) as a way to reduce public pressure and blow off steam,” Knox said.

While Rangel and the other victims’ families maintain faith that their loved ones are still alive, perhaps subjected to forced labor by the drug cartels, Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission has received information on 15,921 unidentified bodies that have passed through morgues in Mexico, some of which could belong to the missing.

A recent case in Mexico City has highlighted the difficulties surrounded cases of suspected disappearances.

On May 26, a group of young people disappeared from a Mexico City after-hours bar just off the city’s main Reforma boulevard, a block and a half from the U.S. Embassy. Relatives had initially indicated 11 people were missing, but authorities raised the number of 12 Tuesday night.

 

The young people were from the rough-and-tumble Tepito neighborhood and their disappearance only came to light after their parents and other Tepito residents held a protest that blocked a major road. Media reports later said that the fathers of two of the missing young men were suspected former Tepito crime bosses currently doing time in prison.

A witness who said he escaped from the abduction said the young people were taken away by gunmen in masks after partying through the night at the bar. Prosecutors said Tuesday night that surveillance video was found showing the young people entering the bar, but wouldn’t say if there was footage showing them leaving or being abducted.

The witness who reported the kidnapping can no longer be found. The bar’s owner also is missing, but prosecutors said Tuesday night that two waiters and a woman had been detained in the case.

The families have put up missing-person posters with photos of their loved ones throughout the area, and say that almost 10 days later they still have not come home.

 

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Kidnappings in Mexico: 11 kidnapped in daylight from Mexico City bar

May 31, 2013

Source: nbcnews

MEXICO CITY — Eleven young people were brazenly kidnapped in broad daylight from a bar in Mexico City’s Zona Rosa, a normally calm district of offices, restaurants, drinking spots and dance clubs, anguished relatives said Thursday.

The apparent mass abduction purportedly happened sometime between 10 a.m. and noon on Sunday just off the Paseo de la Reforma, the city’s main boulevard, near the Angel of Independence monument and less than two blocks from the U.S. Embassy.

The incident was the second recent high-publicity blemish for the city’s largely unregulated entertainment scene, coming 20 days after the grandson of American civil rights activist Malcolm X was beaten to death at another tough bar in the downtown area.

Calling for authorities to find their loved ones, family members marched Thursday morning from the Interior Department building to the Zocalo, the city’s main square. Later they protested outside the bar, which bears a sign that reads Bicentenario Restaurante-Bar, and demanded to see the bar’s surveillance video.

“How could so many people have disappeared, just like that, in broad daylight?” asked Josefina Garcia, mother of Said Sanchez Garcia, 19, her only son. “The police say they don’t have them, so what, the earth just opened up and swallowed them?”

She said her son wasn’t involved in any criminal activity, and worked at a market stall selling beauty products.

City prosecutors said they had received 11 missing-person reports, but Garcia said residents of the tough downtown neighborhood of Tepito where the victims live thought as many as 15 or 16 people could have been abducted.

The known missing include six men, most in their 20s, a 16-year-old boy and four young women.

While no clear motives had been revealed in the attack, residents of Tepito said there has been a wave of abductions of neighborhood young people in recent months that could be related to organized crime activities. Tepito is the center of black market activities in the city, where guns, drugs, stolen goods and contraband are widely sold.

Mass abductions have been rare in Mexico City, but are common in parts of the country where drug cartels operate and are fighting with rival gangs over territory.

Prosecutors slapped closure stickers on the front doors of the Mexico City bar Thursday, with inscriptions saying the city’s anti-kidnapping unit was investigating abductions at the site.

Late Thursday night, dozens of members of a special police intervention unit, many carrying automatic weapons and wearing helmets and bulletproof vests, blocked off the street in front of the bar and searched inside. Officers would not comment on what they were looking for.

Isabel Fonseca, whose brother is among those missing, said a man who escaped told her that masked men arrived in several white SUVs and took the group away. She said her brother, Eulogio Fonseca, is a street vendor who sells cellphone accessories.

“We want them alive,” Fonseca said. “They went out to have fun; they are not criminals.”

Mexico City’s chief prosecutor, Rodolfo Rios, said investigators had been able to glean little information on the disappearances.

Relatives believe the youths were at the club, which they know as “Heaven,” around midmorning Sunday, when waiters and bar employees herded them out to the street and armed men bundled them into waiting vehicles and spirited them away.

Rios said police had not located any employees of the bar and no other witnesses had presented themselves.

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One Father’s Story Of Child Abduction And Recovery

August 6, 2012

Source: howtolearn.com

By Steve Fenton: After my then-6-year-old son was abducted and taken to Mexico in December 1992, I traveled to Mexico City to plead for his return via the Hague Convention Treaty. The response from the Central Authority director surprised me.

 “The U.S. has a very poor record of returning children to Mexico as well,” he said with a cold,   almost personal glare. I never forgot that.

Eventually, I realized the treaty would be of no help to me and I went on to privately recover my son in April 1993. It was a surreal rescue drama undertaken with the help of a specialized team, disguises, decoy car switches and a stealth flight in a small plane. My young son and I escaped under the noses of the Mexican military, flying 450 miles to Brownsville, Texas, through Mexican airspace.

In Brownsville, the FBI immediately detained and interrogated me, acting on frivolous allegations from Mexico City. Stunned, I was told that the U.S. agents intended to send my son back to Mexico with a Mexican consulate official.

I recount the whole nightmarish experience in Broken Treaty: The True Story of a Father’s Covert Recovery of his Missing Son from Mexico (www.brokentreaty.info).

My son is now an adult and I am still contacted for advice by left-behind parents; not only those of children taken to Mexico, but from parents who “hit a wall” trying to recover their children from the overwhelming complexities of the U.S. judicial system.

What should take weeks turns into months and in some cases years as parents in other countries attempt to retrieve children abducted to the United States. Petitions drag through delays and appeals. The State Department’s own statistics demonstrate what should be serious concerns if the United States wants to lead by example.

A 2010 Compliance Report drafted by the State Department shows that parents filed 324 Hague Convention Treaty applications involving 454 children abducted to the United States from other treaty partner countries. The United States accounts for a staggering 23 percent of all incoming and outgoing caseload petitions. The report showed that we have the poorest record in terms of treaty-specified case resolutions for applications under the accord. We also have the highest ratio of pending cases awaiting resolution.

Hague Treaty guidelines call for expeditious proceedings within six weeks of the date of commencement, but the United States has no clear domestic policy guidelines to even determine if the cases should be heard by federal, state or local courts. Between federal and local venues, there are potentially 31,500 judges who could hear a Hague case. The sobering reality is that most judges are not educated about the treaty. Many who do hear these cases deny the petition because they fear that returning the child will automatically result in custody being awarded to the left-behind parent.

They don’t realize that the treaty specifies children be returned to the state of “habitual residence,” where the proper forum by the requesting court country’s jurisdiction will make any final custody determination.

Several nations have taken steps to streamline the Hague petition quagmire by appointing specifically trained courts and judges within a limited number of courts. The United Kingdom, Austria, Finland, Ireland, Portugal, Romania and Sweden are on the cutting edge of amending their procedures to limited jurisdiction and have greatly reduced the delays in restitution of abducted children.

I hope to see the United States consolidate Hague cases to appointed courts with treaty-educated judges, so we can rightfully enjoy reciprocity by the world community on the return of wrongfully detained children abroad. I know only too well the anguish of the left-behind parent who sees the Hague Treaty as the only hope to recover a child.

Steve Fenton is a specialty building contractor. After his estranged wife spirited their son, an American, away to Xalapa, Mexico, the father decided he had to take action.

With little to no help from the U.S. and Mexican governments after a year and a half, the determined father went on a clandestine recovery mission across the border. What ensued were life-changing events that have defined the lives of father and son.

His book was written with some technical assistance from Capt. Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, the pilot who would later become a national hero after safely landing U.S. Airways Flight 1549 in the Hudson River.

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