Cary woman charged with abducting kids found in Mexico
A Cary woman charged last year with abducting her two young children in Mexico and refusing to return them to their father's legal custody has been located, but Mexican authorities so far are refusing to order her or the children home.
A court in the Mexican state of Tabasco denied a request by McHenry County resident James Carol to return his children - Andrea, 6, and James, 5 - to his custody, according to documents provided by his attorney.
"It's very frustrating," Carol attorney Robert Medansky said. "It's amazing to me that the court (in Mexico) is not respecting our jurisdiction."
Authorities say Carol's former wife, Sonia Leon De Carol, took the couple's children to Mexico in June 2009 after receiving a court order permitting them to take a three-week trip to visit family. James Carol opposed the trip, but his objections were denied.
After arriving in Mexico, police said, Leon De Carol, 44, canceled her plane tickets and cut off contact between the children and her ex-husband. Investigators later discovered that a phone number she had left her former husband to call the kids was out of service. A rental lease she showed a McHenry County judge to prove she planned to return from the trip was bogus, police said.
Leon De Carol has since been charged with child abduction in McHenry County and flight to avoid prosecution in federal court, but so far Mexican authorities have been unwilling to order either her or the children back to Illinois.
The court order refusing to send them back states that for the "normal, healthy development in the best interests of the children," they should remain with their mother in the city of Villahermosa, Tabasco.
The decision followed hearings in March attended by both Carol and his children. It was the first time since last June Carol saw his kids, Medansky said, though it was not an ideal reunion.
"It was really just in passing, outside in the hallway," he said. "Was it any kind of meaningful visitation? No."
The court proceedings, Medansky said, weren't any better. Leon De Carol was permitted to make accusations against her husband without any substantiation, while the court ignored evidence of her misrepresentations and the McHenry County order giving Carol full custody of the children. Carol was given neither an attorney or an interpreter to help him present his side, Medansky said.
However, Carol did receive a small glimmer of hope more recently when a higher legal authority in Mexico remanded the case back to the Tabasco judge for further proceedings. Medansky said he does not know yet when those proceedings will occur, but said Carol will be there.
"He's not willing to give up his kids," he said. "If he needs to go down there, live down there, get a job and get visitation through the courts there, he will."