A Father's Love (16 page)

I was nervous enough already; I didn't need any more pressure. I wasn't comfortable opening myself up to the public, but I realized that I was up against something much bigger than I had imagined. We had no other choice. We needed the public's interest in our case, which would, I hoped, result in some sort of outcry to rectify the situation. I wasn't worried about being interviewed on “live” television; I knew the truth and had nothing to hide. I had six minutes to tell about four and a half years' worth of pain. The interview might be my one chance to plead for help to such a large audience. This was an important and pivotal opportunity, with Sean's future hanging in the balance.

I found myself seated across from
Today
host Meredith Vieira, as Lee Cowan of NBC News opened the segment by presenting a brief summary of the story, showing video clips and photographs of Bruna, Sean, and me as a happy family. Lee then told how, four years earlier, Bruna had called me from Brazil to say that she would not be returning and that I would not be able to see my son again. Lee concluded his segment by informing the audience about Bruna's death.

Meredith Vieira picked up the story from there and conducted a brief interview with me, discussing Sean's Brazilian birth certificate and how Lins e Silva was seeking custody of my son, even though Sean was an American citizen.

I answered Meredith's questions honestly and straightforwardly, but at several points I was on the verge of tears and had to fight back my emotions. Trying to think and speak coherently and succinctly after seeing the opening montage of Sean's photographs was more difficult than I had imagined. I emphasized how this sort of abduction could happen to anyone's child, and how easy it was, due to the slowness of the judicial process in Brazil, for an abductor with enough money and influence to get himself or herself declared the parent.

Meredith seemed truly concerned, and came across to me as sincerely empathetic. Near the end of the interview, she asked, “Has this government done enough to help you?”

I answered honestly that our government was perceived by many in Brazil as a paper tiger—lots of noise, but no action.

Meredith closed the segment saying, “Well, maybe somebody watching, maybe a lot of people, will be able to express their outrage and help you.” She referred viewers to the network's Web site for more information and, as she had at various points throughout the interview, to our brand-new Web site, Bring Sean Home, whose address appeared on the screen.

As it turned out, the nearly seven-minute interview segment was well worth doing. I breathed a sigh of relief, glad that it was over but grateful for such an amazing break, and elated to have been able to make so many people aware of Sean's abduction. Now I could only hope that somebody would help.

The response to the
Today
show went through the roof, which demonstrated to the network that people had further interest in the story. More than a thousand people contacted our Web site. The people who visited the site, and NBC's, were irate at the gross injustice with which I was dealing. Many people blogged about the case or sent e-mails to their representatives in Congress. Others wrote to Brazil demanding Sean's return.

One of the most fortuitous results of doing
Today
was that it set up a meeting for me with Benita Noel, a senior producer for NBC's popular newsmagazine program
Dateline NBC.
On the air since 1992, the program was anchored by Ann Curry, and one of the coanchors was Meredith Vieira. Benita and Meredith were interested in pursuing my story for a possible special presentation on
Dateline
.

 

 

ON SEPTEMBER 25, 2008, my attorney filed the amended application with the Brazilian Central Authority, adding the name and conduct of João Paulo Lins e Silva, along with those of Sean's maternal grandparents, as having wrongfully retained Sean in Brazil, and seeking Sean's immediate return to the United States as stipulated by the Hague Convention. Things were basically starting all over again. Now I was trying to get my son away from what the Brazilian courts themselves eventually referred to as “the second kidnapper.”

On October 13, 2008, the senior Lins e Silva was scheduled to present a talk to his colleagues and fellow attorneys, and to some U.S. State Department officials, at a conference hosted by the International Bar Association in Buenos Aires. The subject? International child abduction. Apparently nobody at the IBA was aware that Lins e Silva's own son, João, was complicit in and named as a kidnapper in a child abduction case, and that Paulo was the architect of the legal strategy that continued to separate Sean from me and keep him in Brazil. What gall!

When we learned about the conference, Mark posted the information on our Web site, noting the audacity and hypocrisy of Paulo Lins e Silva in speaking on the subject of child abduction while his own family was holding Sean. People in the United States and Brazil posted blogs saying, “This isn't right!” Many took it upon themselves to mention the IBA's address, encouraging others to notify the IBA about Lins e Silva's involvement in an international abduction case. “The IBA needs to know this guy has ties to an international abduction case! And he is one of your speakers?”

Although the reasons were never publicly disclosed, the International Bar Association removed Lins e Silva from its conference program. Lins e Silva was furious. Whereas previously he may have arrogantly spoken of me as a gnat to be brushed away or crushed beneath his shoe, now he had been hit where it hurt: in his ego. Lins e Silva was not about to take such an insult lying down.

D
URING THE YEARS OF THE ABDUCTION, I WAS WILLING TO DO anything to see Sean. From late 2005, when our first appeals were filed, my attorneys went back and forth with the kidnappers' attorneys, trying to arrange for any reasonable conditions for parental access, including a mutually agreed upon location where I could visit Sean, even if it meant going to a neutral country or doing so in a non-Hague country, a nation that had not signed the Hague Convention.

They would throw something out and we would say, “Okay.”

Then they would say, “No.”

At other times, they would present a potential location and say, “We want you to meet with Sean here.”

“Yes, I'll go anywhere, under any circumstances,” I would say. “I want to be with my boy.”

Then they'd say, “No.” Or they wouldn't return calls, and the process would simply stop, or they would return to the demand that I come to Brazil.

I jumped at every potential opportunity they dangled in front of me, only to have the chance to see Sean snatched away again and again. Inevitably, every obsequious inch I budged in their direction was met with new conditions for visitation that included their hardened demands that I give up my fight to regain my son. The constant anguish, the perpetual, stabbing emotional pain I felt from longing to be reunited with my son, was nearly unbearable. Through it all, I refused to give up hope, or to acquiesce to the fear that I might never see him again. But it was always there, lurking in the shadows, and it was an awful awareness with which to live.

Finally, in early October 2008, my attorneys secured a court order from the Federal Court of Rio de Janeiro granting me visitation rights with my son during the weekend of Friday, October 17, through Sunday, October 19. This would be my sixth trip to Brazil in my quest to see Sean. As I boarded the red-eye flight from Newark to Rio on October 13, I was thrilled; it was a visitation of only forty-eight hours, but for the first time in four years—the longest four years of my life—I was going to see Sean face-to-face. Yet reality poked holes in my idealistic balloon. I knew anything could happen in Brazil—or nothing could happen.

Nevertheless, I had scraped up the money to buy another airline ticket. Accompanying me were a couple of people from
Dateline NBC
; the show had now decided to follow the case. I was glad to have their interest, but nothing could distract me from my main purpose in returning to Brazil so soon after the fruitless trip following Bruna's death—I was finally going to be able to spend some time with my son.

I was excited, but a little nervous at the same time. How would he respond to me? After all, Sean and I hadn't seen each other in more than four years, and I had no idea what his captors had told him about me—although, judging from their allegations claiming that I had abandoned him and never wanted to be with him, I could guess that most of it wasn't good. I packed an extra suitcase, filled with gifts, photos, and some of Sean's favorite toys—at least, they had been his favorites four years earlier. My son was now eight years old. I figured that even if his tastes had changed, the pictures and toys might bring a smile to his face, or help evoke pleasant memories of our life together in New Jersey.

Similar to weekend visitation privileges for a divorced parent in the United States, the Lins e Silvas and Ribeiros were ordered by the federal court to an 8:00 PM start time for my visit on that Friday. That seemed odd to me; perhaps the relatives wanted Sean to be fatigued at the end of the day when he first saw me. I couldn't be sure, but if that's all I could get, I'd take it.

I arrived in Rio and checked in at the Marriott hotel across from Copacabana Beach. Under different circumstances, this might have been a lovely place to vacation. Now the dark, cloudy weather that enveloped the city seemed unfriendly and foreboding. I settled into my room and tried to wait patiently, hoping to hear from Ricardo soon. I was ready to go at a moment's notice, because, as I had already learned, the Brazilian courts could be quite fickle, and the best laid plans could be ignored, changed, or totally obliterated.

Shortly before 7:00 PM, Ricardo called from court. Things had changed. João Lins e Silva, Bruna's Brazilian husband, who had been given temporary guardianship of Sean after Bruna's death, had filed a last-minute appeal to prevent me from seeing my son. The judge denied the appeal but stated that since the hour was late and it was raining, Sean should be handed over the next morning, at 8:00. There were no restrictions in the judge's order regarding where Sean and I could go or what we could do. I would soon find out, however, that the Lins e Silvas and Ribeiros had their own rules, which trumped the orders of the court. They insisted that the visit take place at Lins e Silva's residence and that Sean not be “exposed publicly,” in other words, seen openly with me in public. If that stipulation were to be violated, I was warned, the visitation would be revoked. I had no interest in making a public display of Sean; I wanted only to see my son and spend time with him. The NBC crew was not to come along. Later that same night, I received a call from the U.S. ambassador to Brazil promising me that an embassy representative would accompany me to the visit location, just in case.

I showed up as instructed, on Saturday at 8:00 AM, at the address João Lins e Silva had given to the federal courts. I was to meet Sean at the apartment complex in the gated community where Lins e Silva and Raimundo and Silvana Ribeiro supposedly lived.

“Wait here till we know everything is safe,” Ricardo said. “I will come for you.”

Along with a U.S. consular officer, I waited in the backseat of a van while two Brazilian justice officials, accompanied by two agents of the Federal Police, went inside to get Sean. I anxiously peered out the windows, waiting for any sign of my son. A hired bodyguard kept watch nearby, just in case. I was glad he was there. I hadn't forgotten about the death threats I'd received in New Jersey. I was aware of another father who, while attempting to see his abducted child, was brutally beaten. The assailants were mysteriously never found. Stranger things had happened in Brazil, where a foreigner who couldn't speak the language and didn't know the good guys from the bad guys might “accidentally” get caught in some stray gunfire. Now here I was, on their territory, in front of the gates leading to their apartment. That was part of the reason why Ricardo thought it best that I remain in the van until Sean was released for the visit.

I waited. And waited. Watching the minutes tick away on my watch, I tried to pass the time by reviewing some pictures and short home movies I had brought along to show Sean on a small-screen Sony digital camera. An hour passed, while Ricardo paced back and forth on the sidewalk next to the van. One hour turned into two. I put away the home movies and attempted to quell my restlessness by shutting my eyes. Only for a second or two. I didn't want to miss the moment when Sean appeared.

Three hours dragged by.

Finally, word came down. Lins e Silva was not there and nobody knew where he was. He was gone. João Paulo Lins e Silva, the second kidnapper, had left his new baby girl, a mere month-old infant, his own child, with my former in-laws and had departed, apparently taking my child along with him. Sean was gone.

I was furious and devastated at the same time. How can these people jerk around the law like this? Yet, almost in the same instant, I thought,
Okay, this guy just defied a federal court order not only from the United States but from the federal court in Brazil. This is a federal case, and he is interfering with court-ordered custody terms. Surely they are going to go after him and bring him to justice. More important, they will bring Sean back to me.

Although I was angry enough to jump on the first plane out of the country, I decided to stay in Rio and wait. Maybe I'd get to see Sean after all. Maybe I'd get to bring him home. Maybe the tide would turn.

It did. It got worse. I stayed out of sight, holed up in my hotel room, waiting to hear from my lawyer. Throughout the day, somebody at the hotel's front desk kept calling, urging me to come downstairs. “There are men here waiting to see you,” the desk clerk said nervously. “They need you to come down here.”