Nevada case sheds light on international child abduction

Monday, July 11, 2005 | 10:44 a.m.

On a day not unlike today five years ago, 4-year-old Jessica Harrison smiled at her dad, Mark, and her grandmother, Lydia, in a Henderson parking lot.

A photo of the moment shows Jessica's hair loose and shoulder-length; she's wearing overalls and a short-sleeved purple and pink shirt. It was taken July 11, 2000. Mark and Lydia would never see Jessica again.

Now more than half of Jessica's short life has gone by, and as far as her father and grandmother know, she is still with her mother in Mexico.

And Mark and Lydia are still fighting their way through a maze of bureaucracies as their story becomes a case study in what experts on international child abduction say is an all too common phenomenon -- when certain marriages break up, foreign-born spouses of U.S. citizens take their children and run, straight to their country of birth.

As in the case of the Harrisons, a large number of these cases involve Mexico.

And the anniversary of that day in a parking lot serves to call attention to a problem that affects hundreds of families nationwide, a number that will only grow as the number of marriages between native and foreign-born people increases, along with awareness of the issue, said Julia Alanen, director of the international division at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

Alanen, whose Washington-based nonprofit agency works with the State Department, the lead agency on parental abductions to foreign countries, said about a third of the 1,200-plus cases her staff of nine handles in a year involve Mexico.

That includes children brought from and taken to Mexico, she said.

Rene Hulse, Nevada senior deputy attorney general, who works with the state's Missing Children Clearinghouse, said two of the five cases of parental abductions to foreign countries she has handled in the last year have involved Mexico.

She said the agency didn't keep track of abductions to Mexico on a year-by-year basis.

The large number of cases involving Mexico owes in part to the country's proximity, as well as the fluidity of the U.S.-Mexico border, the number of Mexican migrants in the states, and economic reasons, Alanen said.

But the ease with which parents and sometimes other family members abduct their children to Mexico does not mean it's easy to get them back, as the Harrisons have found.

Drafted at the 1980 Hague convention, the set of laws governing child abduction are fairly complex, specific to each country and are only in effect once two countries have agreed to them bilaterally. The United States has such agreements with 55 countries -- including Mexico.

But as the State Department noted in a recently released annual report, Mexico is considered "not fully compliant" with the convention, as delays in cases often come about due to the inability of authorities to locate children, as well as the use of a special appeals process which can block proceedings almost indefinitely.

"Unfortunately, although Mexico is a signatory, the results have not always been positive," Alanen said.

To help deal with Mexico on the issue, Alanen has brought in two law students from that country as interns and is hiring a new case worker who speaks Spanish -- in addition to the four members of her nine-person staff who are bilingual.

Looking for the children is difficult.

On Friday Lydia recalled five years of maddening false turns and scams in her search for Jessica -- including helping bring down former Henderson Judge Pro Tem Peter LaPorta, who took $6,750 from the Harrisons, claiming he could bring Jessica back.

Lydia said as recently as a few weeks ago Mexican federal authorities were saying they can't locate Jessica in her mother's hometown, Puebla -- though she says the family of the girl's mother has lived in the same house for decades.

She has some hope, nevertheless, from recent work by the FBI, which has a legal attache in Mexico, whom she hopes can put pressure on local authorities.

Still, David Schrom, special agent in the Las Vegas FBI office, said that his agency can only do so much unless it gets cooperation from Mexico.

Jessica's grandmother also writes anyone she can on the case, she says, ranging from the Rev. Jesse Jackson to Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev.

Sharyn Stein, a Reid staffer, said the senator is a sponsor of two bills that would help deal with the issue of abductions to foreign countries. One would fund what is called the U.S. Central Authority, a Justice Department office linked to the Hague convention, and the other would help prevent family abductions in general, Stein said.

Until then, Lydia Harrison said she was painfully aware of the passing of time since a July day five years ago when a little girl smiled for the camera.

"I count the days. I count the hours, the minutes."