Free A Father's Love by David Goldman Page A

but the keys were nowhere to be found.
    The reality of the situation was now hard to deny: Bruna was not coming back. I knew I needed some legal counsel, so I started calling around Red Bank for attorneys. Mom and Dad went with me for many of the initial meetings, both for moral support and to help me remember what the attorneys said. My mind was still muddled by the shock that I had found myself in such a position, seeking legal representation so my son could sleep in his own room.
    Some of the attorneys with whom I spoke did not feel my situation was their sort of case, or they felt it was outside the area of their expertise. Most were willing to recommend others I should contact. All of them offered two consistent bits of free advice: “Start taping all of your conversations with Bruna,” and “Do not step foot in that country without legal representation.”
    In meeting with the various attorneys, one name surfaced in almost every conversation, that of a local Red Bank lawyer named Patricia Apy. “Patricia Apy is the best of the best for this kind of case,” I was advised. But when I contacted her, Apy said her caseload was too heavy and she turned me down.
    Eventually, she called me back. “I have an opening and can take your case, if you are still interested,” she said. To me, it was almost like a sign that she was the right person for the job. Her office was a mere five minutes from my home, a fortuitous circumstance I would come to appreciate in the years ahead.
    When I first met with Apy, she seemed highly professional, yet friendly and easy to talk to. “Call me Tricia,” she said with a winsome smile. Tricia had a good understanding of the ramifications of Bruna’s absconding with our son. Most important, she recognized that ours was not a custody case but an abduction case, and as such, if I ever wanted Sean to come home, my best hope was to file for help under something called the Hague Convention, an agreement on the civil aspects of international child abduction.
    I had never heard of the Hague Convention, so Tricia explained that it was an international treaty signed by more than eighty countries, including the United States and Brazil, agreeing upon principles and actions to remedy international parental child abduction. Initially, the United States Congress, in ratifying the treaty, clearly believed that the need for guidelines concerning the return of abducted children grew out of Middle Eastern marriages in which a man married a non–Middle Eastern woman and then absconded with their child, often returning to a country in which the woman had no recourse and even fewer rights. In fact, twenty years of practice under the treaty would reveal that more mothers than fathers engaged in the wrongful removal of children, basically kidnapping their own children and running off to foreign countries, most notably Brazil, Mexico, and Japan. Japan was not a signatory to the Hague agreement, but Mexico and Brazil were.
    Under the Hague Abduction Convention, Tricia informed me, children must be returned swiftly, and a custody hearing must take place where the child normally lives, which in our case meant New Jersey, not Brazil. Like her fellow attorneys, Tricia emphatically warned me against spontaneously booking a flight to Brazil in an attempt to get Sean back. “Do not go to Brazil,” she said. “You cannot set foot in that country. If you do, she could drag you into a custody case or some false or criminal charges, and you will be in their jurisdiction, and you don’t want that. This is not about custody. You and Bruna are not divorced; you are not legally separated. You did not consent for Sean to take up permanent residence in Brazil. She has abducted your son.” Tricia further explained to me that the Hague Convention stipulated that children taken out of a country without the permission of both parents should be returned within six weeks.