Another story about international child custody and parental abduction

You may have recently heard about an American father’s 10 month search for his missing 5-year-old daughter. The mother of the child took the young girl to Germany in violation of the child custody agreement and hid from international authorities until the mother-daughter pair were identified this month. This article follows a similar scenario where a 51-year-old father from North Carolina also lost his 2-year-old daughter to a parental abduction in violation of the father’s child custody. The 2-year-old and her mother are currently in Syria.

Over the last year the 51-year-old father from Florida has been fighting a custody battle involving multiple states and countries. Though he has been trying to get his daughter back for one year the father is no closer than he was last summer, and he says his daughter needs medical attention. Doctors in the United States diagnosed the 2-year-old girl with global developmental delay, a serious developmental condition and the young girl may also have autism.

The battle for the girl’s custody began when the father took his young daughter last June to Istanbul, Turkey to see the father’s sister who is an expert in autism and child psychology. While the father and daughter pair was in Turkey, the mother visited the young girl. The mother returned to her native Syria after her U.S. tourist visa expired in March 2019. The father and mother agreed the mother would temporarily stay in Turkey with their daughter until the process for a new U.S. visa was complete.

The father expected his daughter and the mother to return to the United States in two weeks but the two never returned and the mother and daughter are now in Syria. The father has visited his young daughter twice in Syria since last summer, but the father has not made any gains in the custody battle. He has now turned to a group of North Carolina family lawyers for help and they are doing all they can to return his daughter home safely, but working with the Syrian government on matters such as this is notoriously difficult.