Update: Mia is back in Mobile and safe! Please pray for healing and reconciliation as it will be a long road of treatment to fully get our girl back. Thank you for all your support.
My daughter, Mia, was kidnapped on July 2nd by her mother and taken to California where she is basically being held hostage. As many of you know I won custody of Mia in 2016 after years of struggling through legal obstacles. Her mother has done nothing but make the custody and visitation situation ever since as convoluted and expensive as possible by interfering with travel plans, taking money from itineraries and using it to take herself places, and even changing Mia’s return flights to different days and different cities and not informing me where to pick her up (I've had to call the airline to find out what flight she was on and Mia's mother once was two days late sending Mia back and sent her to New Orleans at midnight and only informed me after she was already in route). Now she has taken Mia and refuses to return her, in an attempt trick the state of California into changing custody to Mia’s grandmother, who already sued for and was granted guardianship, temporarily, in order to gain child support payments from me. They have also thrown all matter of accusations of abuse and neglect at me and my family to keep me from being able to get Mia back by filing multiple restraining orders based on these unfounded accusations.
I have had to retain 3 attorneys, 1 in Alabama and 2 in California, in order to fight these frivolous cases and bring Mia back home. So far, we have succeeded in overturning the guardianship and dismissing most of the restraining orders as well as domesticating all custody and visitation orders from Alabama to be enforced in California. However, when I flew to California in August to get Mia back with a court order ordering Mia’s return to me and giving me sole custody, they were not where the guardianship said they were supposed to be and the grandmother refuses to give their location. We now have the District Attorney’s office involved in trying to locate Mia but the legal bills continue to mount as we have passed the retainer fee for the attorney in California and will continue to have to pay as long as we are looking for Mia and haven’t found her. This coupled with having to purchase plane tickets to no avail before and having to pay again whenever Mia is found to go to California to bring her back home has put enough of a financial strain on us where asking for help is now necessary.
My daughter, Mia, was kidnapped on July 2nd by her mother and taken to California where she is basically being held hostage. As many of you know I won custody of Mia in 2016 after years of struggling through legal obstacles. Her mother has done nothing but make the custody and visitation situation ever since as convoluted and expensive as possible by interfering with travel plans, taking money from itineraries and using it to take herself places, and even changing Mia’s return flights to different days and different cities and not informing me where to pick her up (I've had to call the airline to find out what flight she was on and Mia's mother once was two days late sending Mia back and sent her to New Orleans at midnight and only informed me after she was already in route). Now she has taken Mia and refuses to return her, in an attempt trick the state of California into changing custody to Mia’s grandmother, who already sued for and was granted guardianship, temporarily, in order to gain child support payments from me. They have also thrown all matter of accusations of abuse and neglect at me and my family to keep me from being able to get Mia back by filing multiple restraining orders based on these unfounded accusations.
I have had to retain 3 attorneys, 1 in Alabama and 2 in California, in order to fight these frivolous cases and bring Mia back home. So far, we have succeeded in overturning the guardianship and dismissing most of the restraining orders as well as domesticating all custody and visitation orders from Alabama to be enforced in California. However, when I flew to California in August to get Mia back with a court order ordering Mia’s return to me and giving me sole custody, they were not where the guardianship said they were supposed to be and the grandmother refuses to give their location. We now have the District Attorney’s office involved in trying to locate Mia but the legal bills continue to mount as we have passed the retainer fee for the attorney in California and will continue to have to pay as long as we are looking for Mia and haven’t found her. This coupled with having to purchase plane tickets to no avail before and having to pay again whenever Mia is found to go to California to bring her back home has put enough of a financial strain on us where asking for help is now necessary.