My father choose this method of travel because my mother was an illegal and my parents could not marry because my father already had a wife and child in the US. A dark cloud hangs over this time as accusations of a crime of a much more serious nature had occurred.

My father in his obsession with possessing my mother never felt he had enough control over her. During our time in the USA, my mother gave birth to two sons. All were born at home with no medical care. My father theorized that the more children a woman had with a man the more tied she was to him. This time was full of emotional and physical abuse to both mother and children. Children were always a means of control for him. The abuse began to escalate and my mother finally decided she had to take action to escape him or he may kill her. She discovered my father had never signed her papers to apply for citizenship so she had no real legal rights in this country. All documentation related to my siblings and I declared only my father as a parent. This time is the most violent in my memory. My father beat up my mother and she sported a black eye on multiple occasions. My mother went to the police with information on the crime mentioned before. My father was arrested and held while the police questioned both mother and children. They questioned us on where my father's gun was located. My mother would not tell. I feared for my mother's life so I told them. I was only eight or nine at the time. My mother chastised me for disclosing this information later. I was confused and scared. Earlier that week my father had tried to run her off the road while we were in the car with him. I remember it all. My father was let out on bail several days later and my mother went right back to him. My father chastised me for telling the police where his gun was located. I always wondered why he had not beaten or killed me for this. I guess the police where watching…we moved soon afterwards, in an attempt to get out of the jurisdiction of that police department. We started a new school. When I asked why we were moving, my mother told me it was because of me.

Shortly after moving, my father took us to visit his mother in North Carolina. This was without my mother, as they did not get along. While we were there, we observed him listening in on my mothers phone conversations. He bugged the phone. My father packed us up and took us to Mexico. He changed our names, forged many documents and we were on the run. It was open season on us. First order of business was to brainwash the children. He told us of how our mother was trying to kill us. Of how she didn't love us, of how she was having sex with every police officer in the country, of how the government was out to get him. We moved around from place to place, school to school. We spent so many nights sleeping in the car I remember that as how I spent a large part of my childhood. Every day hearing our father speak of how it was all her fault. I learned recently from my mother he had placed a hit out on her but the man my father hired had not been paid so he did not carry it out. (This man confessed this to my mother) My father befriended other criminals, drug smugglers and such. He abused us without mercy. I first began to contemplate suicide at nine, I saw no way out. He claimed the police wanted to kill us and when I mustered up the courage to beg him to let me go live with my mother he said no. His methods of punishment were successful in preventing us children from becoming close. We accused each other in an attempt to sward off beatings. The cruelty, poverty and brainwashing bread hatred that was directed at each other many times. There was absolutely no love. My father finally married a Mexican woman who for a time distracted some of his beatings. She was kind and loving and the only source of affection I received. However, when she married him, her fate was sealed. We returned to the USA when I was 12, still on the run. When I was 14, my father felt safe enough to buy a house, which he placed in his wife's name (so the government couldn't take it away you understand). My mother found us there. I was 15. The mental and emotional wreckage on both ends was enormous. My father did not run because he now had property. My mother would not prosecute because of her fear of both my father and the police. I remained suicidal until the age of 18 when I moved out. It was heaven. As a person, I was completely socially inept. I did not understand how things worked either business wise or how to interact with others socially. In high school, I was always a social outcast. Slowly, with the help of wonderful people along the way I began to figure out how to function normally in society. I was determined to have all the things "normal people" had. I put myself through college while entering one self-destructive relationship after another. I thought if I could get one of those morally bankrupt men to love me it would somehow make up for the lack of love my father subjected me too. It did not.

My stepmother became ill with cancer. My father tried to get her not to fight it and argued constantly with the doctors until he was barred from coming to the hospital. She received treatment in Mexico and after awhile my father convinced her to let him take the three children, he had with her to the US. While there, he and his live-in mistress conceived a child in my stepmother's house (yes, my stepmother was still alive and was unaware he and her children were living under the same roof with her husbands mistress). Later the doctors found a lump in her brain. They said she had 5 years to live even if she did nothing about it. She gave up. She died two days later. My father tried to get her family to have her funeral without the children, however, an anonymous donor donated the money to have them brought over and he had no choice.

In 1995 through the grace of God, I found a wonderful man and in 1999, we wed. I am very happy in my marriage and recently had my first child. I have no relationship with my father today nor do I desire one. My mother and I do have an active relationship though it holds a lot of baggage. I know (especially when I look at my own child) that my father is a very evil and sick person. Do I think he should have served time for his abduction? Absolutely. Children should never be used as weapons and in most cases of abduction that is precisely the reason the act is committed.