Couple Resists Child Abduction

May 20, 2004 permalink

A couple in Halifax are resisting police efforts to seize their baby. Both have previously lost children to the family law system, though neither have ever harmed a child. The mother was charged with child abduction in Ontario and acquitted by a jury.

This Story from the Halifax Herald gives the parent's side of the story as well as that of Children's Aid. The original story includes pictures of the mother and father.

The original link, now dead, was: http://www.herald.ns.ca/stories/2004/05/20/f224.raw.html

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Desperate mom won't give up baby
'If I walk out of here ... I know I'll never see her again'

Thursday, May 20, 2004, The Halifax Herald Limited, By SUSAN BRADLEY / Staff Reporter EXCLUSIVE

Carline VandenElsen sounded desperate Wednesday morning as she talked about why she will not allow the Children's Aid Society of Halifax to take away her five-month-old baby.

"Why are they resorting to this?" she said by phone from inside her Shirley Street house during a standoff with police.

"I am not a criminal. I'm not a violent person. I don't use alcohol or drugs. Why do they want to take away what's left of my family?"

Ms. VandenElsen, 41, called the police actions "barbaric."

"At 1:30 this morning, we heard a loud banging on the door," she said. "The bangs got louder. Then there were threatening telephone calls. We didn't answer the door.

"The police brutality started. They used a big heavy tool for breaking down the doors. Larry, my husband, barricaded the door."

She said her husband's mother, Mona Finck, was also in the house.

"This isn't good for her. She's almost 80 and she's ailing."

At the time Ms. VandenElsen spoke, neither she nor her husband had communicated with a police negotiator, who was part of a heavy police presence in the locked-down south-end neighbourhood.

But Ms. VandenElsen voiced a demand that she said might help defuse the volatile situation.

"What we would like ... is for a lawyer with the Nova Scotia Barristers' Society to take this case before the Appeal Court."

By early afternoon, the family's phone service had been cut off.

Mr. Finck, 50, a Halifax native, played junior hockey for St. Catharines, Ont., and was drafted by the Pittsburgh Penguins in 1974, although he never played in the National Hockey League.

Ms. VandenElsen said she was "in shock" and fearful about what might happen to the family.

"I know what I'm up against," she said. "I'm sitting here looking at a bullet hole in my window. But if I walk out of here with my baby in my arms, I know I'll never see her again."

She said she is still breastfeeding Mona-Clare.

Ms. VandenElsen wouldn't say who fired the weapon or if it was still in the house.

"I'm not prepared to discuss that right now," she said.

And she couldn't predict how the standoff might end.

"I'm in protective mode and weighing my options," she said. "I'm afraid, afraid of what the police could do."

She said her husband "is very angry - an anger born of fear. This has been done to us before."

In fact, both have lost custody of older children from previous relationships and have been prosecuted for child abduction. Their legal troubles and their response to them weighed heavily in a Nova Scotia Supreme Court judge's decision to remove Mona-Clare from her parents.

On Oct. 14, 2000, Ms. VandenElsen, then in Stratford, Ont., disappeared with her seven-year-old triplets after a bitter divorce. It happened just before a court hearing that she feared would result in her losing access to the children.

In the next three months, she brought them to the Queensland area of Nova Scotia before settling in Acapulco, Mexico.

The children, two boys and a girl, were found and reunited with their father in January 2001. They continue to live with him in Stratford.

Ms. VandenElsen, charged with child abduction, successfully argued in court that taking off with the children was necessary to protect them from the emotional harm of being separated from her.

But last August, the Ontario Court of Appeal threw out her acquittal and ordered a new trial, scheduled for this September.

Mr. Finck was convicted in 2000 of abducting his four-year-old daughter, whose mother had died, from an Ontario reservation in 1999.

He served a prison term and since his release has refused to undergo court-ordered psychological assessment and counselling.

The court wants both parents to undergo a mental health assessment as part of the custody case, Ms. VandenElsen said.

Both have refused.

"There is not one piece of evidence, nothing," she said. "No one can substantiate an allegation that I, or my husband, need mental assessments. This is not about fitness. We are political misfits. We are a real threat to the family law system."

Ms. VandenElsen has written a book called America's Most Wanted Mother about her treatment by the legal system and her flight with her three children.

The couple are determined to keep fighting what they consider to be a corrupt family law system. Mr. Finck has a website detailing his battle to keep his daughter, Chantelle Rose, whom he has not seen in 4 1/2 years.

"There was never one shred of evidence that either one of us ever harmed our children," said Ms. VandenElsen, a former high school teacher.

"This is a political witch hunt . . . a multibillion-dollar standoff - that's what it has cost taxpayers to pay for this family law industry."

The industry abuses and exploits children and their families, she said.

Ms. VandenElsen described Mona-Clare as "healthy and very attentive."

"She's just thriving, she's sitting up, rolling over. She's in the beginning stages of crawling. Her needs are her mother and father."

Indeed, evidence given at the Nova Scotia Supreme Court hearing in January included this statement from a Halifax doctor:

"No concerns re: baby/interaction. Mother seems very stable and extremely loving toward baby."

The doctor also said she observed both parents on several occasions, calling them "loving, caring and concerned about their baby."

But Justice Deborah Smith questioned whether either Ms. VandenElsen or her husband was mentally healthy enough to provide stable care for the infant.

A report from the Children's Aid Society in Stratford, Ont., described the pair as "confrontational and verbally aggressive. Mental health requires assessment."

In January, Ms. VandenElsen left Halifax with her baby, then three weeks old, fearing rightly that Children's Aid in Halifax was preparing to take her newborn daughter.

When society workers went to the Shirley Street home with an apprehension order, neither she nor her baby could be found.

Mr. Finck said at that time that the couple had begun making plans months before the birth to prevent Children's Aid from taking the baby. He said he did not know where his wife and daughter were.

Ms. VandenElsen would not say when she and her baby returned to Halifax but she revealed that she and her husband have taken the baby out for walks around the neighbourhood.

"Anyone who has seen us can tell we are loving parents and our baby is healthy and happy," she said.