Some Parents Feel Driven to Abduction

Sept. 3 -- Lolita Garmyn was leaving her Moscow apartment when, she says, three men grabbed her, forced her back inside, tied up her and her mother, drugged them both and then left, taking her 7-year-old daughter.

The men made no secret of who had sent them — the woman's ex-husband, an American named Patrick Garmyn, Lolita Garmyn told ABCNEWS.com in an interview from Moscow.

"They didn't even hide it," she said. "I said, 'What do you need?' Maybe they wanted money. But they said, 'No, we only need the girl. We're coming for your husband.'"

When little Amelia Garmyn resurfaced, 10 days later, she was halfway around the world with her father in Napoleon, Ohio.

Though Patrick Garmyn's lawyer denies that the two women were drugged, he admits that his client did hire the men to get his daughter back. He had to, the lawyer said, because Lolita Garmyn had illegally taken the child back with her to her native Russia, violating the child custody agreement she had signed. There was no other way to get her back to the United States, the lawyer said.

"It was basically impossible to get meaningful assistance from the State Department," said Greg Vangunten, Patrick Garmyn's lawyer. "I don't say that to fault them, because it's very difficult to get anything done when the Russian government doesn't abide by the Hague Convention [an international agreement to deal with child abductions]. This is not the first child that has had to be forcibly removed from Russia."

For her part, Lolita Garmyn said she only took the child to Russia from Ohio in April 2001 because her ex-husband, who had already abducted the girl and taken her out of the country once, was threatening to do it again. She felt that the visitation rules that were set by the court in February 2001 would not prevent him from taking her, because the person who would supervise his visits with the girl was a longtime acquaintance of his, and the visits could take place anywhere in Ohio.

She said that when she got to Moscow she notified the authorities in the Ohio, explaining what she had done and why. She also appealed to the Russian government and law enforcement for protection from her ex-husband.

"I wasn't hiding," she said. "I just left because I didn't feel safe. I could not take another chance that he would take her again."

The girl — who has been abducted by one or the other of her parents four times — is now in a foster home. A court gave each parent the right to two two-hour supervised visits per week. A preliminary custody hearing has been set for mid-September.

Legal Maze

The Garmyn case is just one of the roughly 400 incidents each year reported to the U.S. State Department in which an American parent and a foreign spouse cannot resolve their differences in a custody dispute, and one or the other takes the child to another country.

While the reasons that Lolita Garmyn took her daughter out of the United States and Patrick Garmyn hired people to bring her back seem to be primarily tied up in their personal differences, some international parental abduction cases have their basis in the cultural differences of the parents, when they cannot agree on the right environment to bring up their child.