By Sean Aaron Cruz
For the record my name is Sean Aaron Cruz. I am here today
to testify in support of House Bill 2014, and am very grateful for State Representative
Alissa Keny-Guyer’s leadership on this urgent issue.
Chair Barker, Vice Chairs Garrett and Kreiger, and members
of the Committee, it is good to see so many friendly and familiar faces. I owe
many of you my lifelong gratitude for your support of Senator Avel Gordly’s Senate
Bill 1041 in the 2005 session, which passed on a unanimous House floor vote.
Senate Bill 1041 has since come to be known as Aaron’s Law,
in memory of my late, abducted son Aaron Cruz, and I hope that someday its
principles will be applied nationwide. If Aaron’s Law had been on the books in
1995, then my family would be whole and my son still alive.
However, it has been seventeen years since my four children
disappeared in an abduction organized by members of a church congregation in
three states, and it is my opinion that very little has changed either to deter
or resolve non-stranger abductions in Oregon .
I first briefed Senator Avel Gordly to the story of my
children’s abduction and to the issue in general in 2001, and she promised to
work on legislative solutions. In 2002, she offered me the job as her
legislative staff, and I began to work on legislation in the 2003 session, when
I testified before Senate Judiciary and the Ways and Means Public Safety
Subcommittee.
Ever since the 2003 session, I have been contacted by
parents whose children have been abducted by the other parent, which is how I
became acquainted with Mrs Charisse Laverdiere, who has traveled from Southern
California to speak with you today, and their stories all have similar
elements, like mine. Mrs. Laverdiere is the most recent of several dozen
parents who have contacted me for advice over the years.
We are all parents of children who have been abducted by
known perpetrators.
We have gotten no help from the police in large part because
the children are with a parent, but there are also several statutory and
institutional factors that contribute to the inaction of law enforcement and
that continue to stand in the way of the recovery of our children and many
others like us.
We parents of abducted children can’t find a lawyer willing
to listen to our stories or who might be familiar with the issue of
non-stranger child abduction in any real sense of legal expertise. I never met
one. Family lawyers will tell you they don’t practice criminal law. They want to frame it as a custody issue. If
the parent can get into court, with or without a lawyer, the judge is no help,
and court processes can grind out over years.
And yet there is still a child missing, a child suffering
terrible abuse, emotional abuse that amounts to torture. These parents start
looking for help on line and that leads them to me, from all over the state
since 2003.
The status quo in 1996 when my children were abducted is
much the same status quo today.
We are here today, Mrs Charisse Laverdiere and I, to
describe to you the chain of events that have taken place in our lives as
parents whose children were abducted from Oregon
by known perpetrators.
(to Mrs
Laverdiere’s testimony)
With Aaron’s Law, Oregon
became the first state in the nation where abducting a child creates a civil
cause of action, providing new tools to deter and resolve non-stranger child
abductions. It is now more than seven years after its passage and still no
information about the statute appears on the Oregon State Police Missing and
Exploited Children Clearinghouse website, and last summer its first known application
came in the Kyron Horman case.
I have no idea how a citizen whose child has been abducted or
who is in danger of being abducted would learn that the law exists or how it
might be applied. It’s buried in the ORS where only a lawyer could find it.
The Kyron Horman abduction is unique in several ways. It is
the largest search effort in the history of the state, and is at the same time
probably the only non-stranger abducted child that Oregon
law enforcement is actually looking for.
During a press conference two years ago, the Sheriff was
asked if there were any other missing children besides Kyron out there, and the
Sheriff responded “none that meet the criteria.”
What is the
criteria, exactly? What chain of events take place when a child is reported missing or abducted? What does it take for a parent
of an abducted child to be taken seriously by the Oregon State Police? Who
knows?
The 2004 Senate President’s Interim Parental and Family
Abduction Task Force found that no state agency—and therefore no one—knew how
many Oregon children were
abducted in any given period of time, because no one was tracking them. They
estimated the number at several thousand, but no one knew for sure. These facts
are in the Task Force’s Final Report.
I’d like also to call the Committee’s attention to the news
release from the Beaverton Police Department dated May 16, 2012 . More than a dozen police agencies
and other governmental agencies in the US, New Zealand, Australia and Canada
were involved in recovering this child, and yet the Oregon State Police is not
one of them, and no information about this child, missing since December 2010,
was ever posted on the OSP Missing Children’s Clearinghouse. What
is the criteria?
There are other cases where children who have been
parentally abducted from Oregon
are identified on the National Clearinghouse for Missing and Exploited Children, but not on the OSP website.
What is the criteria? What is the chain of events that take
place in Oregon when a child is
reported abducted by a known perpetrator?
We urge your strong support for HB 2014.
Additional comments
and recommendations
The 2004 Task Force on Parental and Family Abductions
identified several systemic and institutional problems, among them:
(1) That “often” parents “often” take out their anger with
each other through their children, and that some “even abduct their own child.”
The Task Force found “that this is extremely detrimental to the emotional and
mental well being of the children, and at time may even put the life of the child in
danger.”
(2) The real injuries a child suffers is not recognized in
current statute. “…the injury a child receives, when the child has been
abducted by one of the child’s parents, does not necessarily include physical
injury. The injury is more in the nature of mental
trauma or mental injury. Nonetheless, the injury is real and may be even more long
lasting and damaging than physical injury.”
(3) That there was a general lack of awareness among law
enforcement, the courts, the bar and social service professionals, which partially
explains the low priority all give to non-stranger abduction cases. This lack
of awareness factors into the system’s willingness to allow the abducting
parent to keep the children indefinitely, and the failure of law enforcement,
the bar and court officers to understand that abductions are continuing crimes and respond
accordingly.
(4) No person or entity in Oregon
knew the number of non-stranger abduction cases originating in Oregon ,
because no agency was tracking them; there was no system to track them; A
parent’s report of the abduction of their child likely went no further than the City or the County taking the
police report. This is probably still the case.
Time is everything. But no one is interested. The court
processes take no interest in the issue of time, the value of time in the life
of a child.
No one understands that a crime is being committed, multiple
crimes. The abduction of your child drains every last emotional reserve and
financial resource you have.
My four children disappeared from Oregon
in a church-sponsored abduction on February
12, 1996 , during the Great Storm of that year, organized by Mormon church
officials in three states: Oregon ,
Washington and Utah .
At a time when I-84 through the Gorge and I-5 at Tacoma were
closed due to landslides and flooding, when my children’s friends and
classmates were safe at home or in school in Washington County, members of this
church group, I came to learn later, were holding my kids in a motel on the Oregon
coast. They waited for the storm to clear and then took my kids to Utah ,
where fellow church members concealed my kids in a series of locations east of Ogden ,
Utah
The Custodial Interference statute states:
ORS 163.245: “A person
commits the crime of custodial interference in the second degree if, knowing or
having reason to know that the person has no legal right to do so, the person takes, entices or keeps another person from the other
person’s lawful custodian or in violation of a valid joint custody order with
intent to hold the other person permanently or for a protracted period.”
And
ORS 163.257: “A person
commits the crime of custodial interference in the first degree if the person
violates ORS 163.245 and:
(a) Causes the person taken,
enticed or kept from the lawful custodian or in violation of a valid joint
custody order to be removed from the state; or
(b) Exposes
that person to a substantial risk of illness or physical injury.”
The statutes make no exceptions for the other parent, family
members or members of a church congregation.
My son Aaron died in Utah ,
alone and sick and without the medical attention he had needed for years, and
my three surviving children continue to live in church enclaves, completely
contained within my former wife’s church. The people who abducted my children
got exactly what they wanted. All this despite an order for joint custody that
had been in effect for five years at the time of the abduction.
Abductions have beginnings but no real endings. The damage
is life long. I don’t think that there is such a thing as a happy ending, all
the more reason to take steps to deter people from abducting their own
children, which is the whole point to Senate Bill 1041, Aaron’s Law, and why HB
2014 is not only necessary but urgently necessary
and important.
Recommendations:
[] Define “protracted” in the Custodial Interference
statute. The lack of a definition contributes directly to the inaction of law
enforcement. How lengthy a head start should a kidnapper have? What is a
reasonable period of time?
[] Add child abduction to the statutory definition of
domestic violence.
[] Recognize the abducted child’s mental and emotional
injuries in statute and actual practice. Prioritize deterrence and access to
medical resources.
[] Recognize abduction as a “continuing crime” in statute
and actual practice.
[] Recognize that parental abductions often involve multiple
perpetrators. Hold them all accountable, which is normally the case in property
or violent crimes.
[] Require local law enforcement to pass all reports of
missing or abducted children to the State Police Missing and Exploited
Children’s Clearinghouse.
[] Add a synopsis of Senate Bill 1041 Aaron’s Law to the OSP
Missing Children’s Clearinghouse and elsewhere.
[] Recognize nontraditional family relationships in the
Custodial Interference statutes.
[] Improve education and awareness throughout the state,
beginning at the state bar, law enforcement and the courts.
Attachments: Beaverton
PD news release, May 16, 2012
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