Dropped charges against woman scuttle extradition

Molly Ball

Thursday, July 29, 2004 | 10:58 a.m.

For five years, Nevada and federal authorities have been fighting to extradite a woman accused of abducting her 6-year-old son from a Las Vegas day-care center in 1988 and taking him to England.

Earlier this month, they finally won the battle: Britain's Home Office, the equivalent of the U.S. Justice Department, denied the woman's last appeal against extradition.

But 57-year-old Melody Carsello will not be coming back to Las Vegas after all. Last week, authorities discovered that the custody violation charges she was to face were dismissed by the Clark County District Attorney's Office more than three years ago.

As Carsello is no longer a wanted woman, she can no longer be extradited, officials said.

The U.S. State Department notified the U.S. Marshals Service, which handles international extraditions for federal agencies, that Carsello was scheduled for extradition, Las Vegas-based Deputy U.S. Marshal Irv Brandt said on Wednesday.

"We checked into whether the authorities in Las Vegas still wanted to investigate her and discovered that they had dismissed the charges," Brandt said.

The case against Carsello was dropped in May 2001, possibly as a result of a blanket order to dismiss as many as 200 cases that had gone cold, Assistant District Attorney J. Charles Thompson said.

"I might have signed it (the order). In fact, I probably did," Thompson said.

"For nonviolent felonies more than 10 years old where there's an outstanding warrant and nobody has been picked up, we routinely dismiss them," he explained. But the Carsello case should not have been dismissed if there was an international warrant in the works, he said.

Thompson said he had no further details on the case because the file was destroyed when the charges were dropped. But he said there was no way Carsello could now be extradited; resurrecting the charges would be impossible, he said.

If extradited, Carsello could have faced up to six years in prison.

Once charges are filed, statutes of limitations do not apply.

Rene Hulse, state children's advocate and senior deputy attorney general, agreed that the effort to get Carsello back to Nevada is over. "Even though England has now approved it (the extradition), it's too late," she said. "The charges were dropped, so there's no active warrant."

While the marshals will not be picking up Melody Carsello, another Las Vegan's extradition from England is going ahead, Brandt said. Marshals will leave Monday to retrieve Michael Farrell, 33, who was arrested by British authorities outside of London in March.

Farrell had been wanted since 2000 on charges of child molestation. The marshals hope to have him booked into the Clark County Detention Center by next Friday, Brandt said.

In Melody Carsello's case, she and her son, Brandon, disappeared in 1988. Carsello was in the process of divorcing her husband, Richard Carsello, who had been awarded custody of Brandon.

The DA's office filed charges of violation of custody rights and parental abduction against Melody Carsello, but the trail went cold.

It was not until 1999 that the state Attorney General's Office, acting on an anonymous tip from the Oregon Missing Children Clearinghouse, located Carsello in southern England, where she was living under the name Michele Masshar. Brandon Carsello, then 17, was known as Jason Masshar.

Carsello's case was at that time Nevada's longest-standing family abduction. Richard Carsello went to England and met his son -- 11 years and 4 days after he had seen him last.

Melody Carsello, meanwhile, claimed she took her son to protect him from his father. She appealed to Britain's Secretary of State, who in June 2000 had ordered her extradition, according to Jane Garvan, a spokeswoman for the Home Office in London.

Carsello's appeals continued. "After careful reconsideration of the case and all the representations made, on 7 July 2004 the Secretary of State upheld his original decision to order Ms. Carsello's return," Garvan wrote in an e-mail to the Sun.

Brandon Carsello is now 22. It was not clear whether he still lived in England.

The Carsello saga recalls a divisive, high-profile custody case from the 1980s, when plastic surgeon Elizabeth Morgan was denied sole custody of her infant daughter and fled with the child to New Zealand. Morgan claimed the girl was being molested by her father, but it was never proven.

A Nevada case -- the 1993 abduction of Henderson 6-year-old Mikey Kale to his father's homeland, Croatia -- prompted Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., and Rep. Jim Gibbons, R-Nev., to sponsor federal legislation requiring both parents to give permission before minors are issued passports. The Mickey Kale Passport Notification Act was enacted in 1999.

Last week, Reid co-sponsored two more bills aimed at preventing children from being kidnapped by their relatives. One would provide federal money to states for investigating abductions; the other would create a national child-custody registry and require foreign countries to work on the issue as a condition of U.S. aid money.

"Almost 80 percent of all the children kidnapped in the United States are taken by a family member -- most often an estranged parent who is not supposed to have custody," Reid said in a statement.

"Parents who steal their children are not acting out of love," Reid added. "The children are pawns, and we must do more to keep them safe."