[xtypo_dropcap]S[/xtypo_dropcap]itting in an unmarked SUV, Keith Prewitt peered at the house he was led to after six months of investigating. After hours of waiting, the garage door opened and a car drove out. Inside, he saw the three-year-old boy.
Seeing him, the father accelerated, and a chase ensued. Because Prewitt was unfamiliar with the area, the father lost him, and he returned to the house to wait. When the car returned, Prewitt blocked them with his SUV and rescued the child.
“This boy was taken when he was one year old from his mother, and it had been two years. When they were reunited I was there and the boy actually recognized his mother and ran to her,” Prewitt said.
District Attorney Investigator Prewitt has spent the last 23 years in law enforcement and works for the District Attorney’s office in Kings County, California. He specializes in rescuing children who were kidnapped by one of their parents, leaving the other parent searching for their missing child.
His work can span the globe. He deals with people who will cross borders, change their identity, and brainwash their children to avoid being found.
The case of the boy he rescued after his stakeout is just one of many he has worked on. It played out like a horror story—a husband and wife couldn’t have children, and they plotted to have the husband get a girl pregnant and steal the child for their own.
The father was an American citizen working as a miner in Peru. His wife lived in the United States. He met a local girl, “they start this relationship and this girl is thinking she’s going to marry him and have his children and everything,” Prewitt said.
They had a baby, and one year later, the husband’s mother came down to Peru. They had a local doctor tell the mother to stop breast feeding and to let the child sleep with the grandmother. “This whole time, the mother of the suspect and the father of the child, his mother, they were plotting to get this child,” Prewitt said.
They tried sneaking the boy out through the airport twice, but Peruvian authorities wouldn’t let them, because they had not heard from the mother. Later, the grandmother left, and the father sneaked the child out across the Ecuadorian border. The mother called to find out where they were, and “he acted like he was just down the street going to the market or something, but he was skipping from country to country heading back to the U.S.”
Once back in the United States, the father and grandmother went into hiding. They skipped across various states, and warrants were issued for their arrest back in Peru. The real problem, however, was that law enforcement wouldn’t take the case as none of them could show they had jurisdiction. They later found the grandmother lived in Kings County, and that’s where Prewitt came in.
“It took six months of interviewing and contacting people, and surveillance and such before I finally got a break and found the boy in the county next door to us,” he said.
Continued on page 2... Parental abduction
Parental Abduction
Such cases are not uncommon. Sometimes it’s a married couple going through a divorce, sometimes it’s a couple who were dating and broke up. One parent may want to keep the child from the other parent, and leave with the hateful line “you will never see this child again.”
“They don’t realize that not only is that unfair, it’s against the law,” Prewitt said. “One parent cannot deny access to a child from another parent.”
A main challenge in the work is how parental abduction is regarded across jurisdictions. In California, every District Attorney’s office has a unit that deals strictly with parental abduction, yet not all states are like that.
“The funny thing about California and child abduction is that it seems we’re one of the only states that really takes parental abduction serious,” Prewitt said.
Prewitt said he worked on a case once where the suspect fled to Louisiana, and the attorneys there were telling him it is not illegal for a parent to kidnap a child there, although local law enforcement still helped recover the child.
International borders can be even more complex. Prewitt is still working on a case where a child was taken to Mexico, and after five years, they still haven’t recovered the child. They had a strong lead once, but Mexican authorities took two years to respond to the search request “and by then they were long gone,” he said.
With minor cases, they tell the parent’s to take the issue to family law court. But if one parent tries to duck the radar, searchers need to take to the streets to find the child.
There are then other issues that come up. “Once one parent takes the child it’s nothing but brainwashing. They’ll tell the child anything to get the child not interested in being reunited with the other parent. It’s unfortunate,” Prewitt said.
He noted that after one case, in particular, the child had to be placed in counseling after being rescued.
The mother was trying to smuggle the child into Canada, yet was caught in Minnesota. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children had blanketed the area with missing child posters, yet each time the child saw a poster, the mother trained her to say “oh, that little girl looks like me but she’s not me.”
“We’re talking about a three-year-old girl and it was just really freaky,” Prewitt said, adding that the mother had even changed their appearance.
After the child was rescued, the mother wasn’t permitted to see her. “She was too dangerous,” Prewitt said, adding that the concern wasn’t that she would hurt the child, but rather that she was abduct her again.
“Nine times out of ten, it’s just that one of the parents is being really selfish and they don’t care if the other parent sees the child ever again,” Prewitt said. “They don’t realize how that hurts the child.”
“Parents think they can do whatever they want with their child and that they can just take off,” Prewitt said. “They think that by leaving the area nobody is going to follow up on that, but again, in California you don’t want to do that because we don’t care where they go. We will track them down and bring that child back here.”
