Please help me rescue my kidnapped son.

My name is Marieke. I live in Vancouver, British Columbia Canada. On July 1, 2015 (Canada Day) my 3-year-old son was kidnapped by his father to the USA. I am raising money on Gofundme to rescue my son from his abusive father, and intolerable living conditions and bring him home to safety.

Background:

After he was kidnapped, I was erased from my son's life. I never gave up hope and continued fighting for him in court for 7.5 years. I had no success because every single order my abuser obtained in court was ex parte without notice or opportunity to be heard. It is illegal to violate someone's due process in the USA, it is even more egregious and completely prohibited to pull these types of stunts in the USA against people in a foreign country.

In October 2022, my abuser came up with a plan to try to stop me from taking him back to court again. He suddenly offered to fly with our son back and forth to Vancouver Canada so we could spend the Christmas holidays together for the first time in 8 years.

I jumped at the opportunity to purchase the tickets for my son and his father to fly to Vancouver on December 16, 2022. His father agreed to purchase the return tickets for him and our son to fly back to California in time for school.

Unable to wait that long to see my son, I also made arrangements with his father to fly to California to see our son in time for the Thanksgiving Holidays.

On November 16, 2022, my son and I reunited and hugged for the first time in 7.5 years. I uploaded the video to Youtube and posted the link here:

For the next 30 days, my son and I stayed with friends in Marina del Rey, California.

During that time, I discovered that my son was living with his father below the deck of an inoperable 33ft fishing boat that has no hot water, no shower and NO TOILET. He is a "sneak aboard" and not permitted to live on this derelict boat in the marina.

His father is a hoarder. The boat is filthy, covered in mold, and filled with bins, boxes and trash, making it difficult to move around, a fire hazard, unsafe and inappropriate for a child to live in.

I learned that our son has fallen off the boat 3 times. His father saved him the first two times. One of those times, our son fell off a friend's boat, during a boat ride, dangerously close to the propellor. His father didn't notice until another child told him.

The third time our son fell off the boat, it was after dark, he had been left unsupervised, and was not wearing a lifejacket. He is not a strong swimmer, he only knows how to tread water. There is no way to get back up onto the dock.

Our son is extremely lucky he didn't hit his head, and he didn't panic or swallow too much water. He was able to swim back up to the surface and had the wherewithal to swim around the boat and find the swim step his father had left down so he had a way to haul himself up out of the water and back onto the boat.

Children are prohibited anywhere in the marina without constant supervision. Swimming is prohibited. When his father is at work, he leaves our son alone and unsupervised 18 hours a day. The father often goes out of town for several days in a row to work in locations without cellular service. Our son sleeps and spends the majority of his waking hours in a crawl space with a tiny skylight.

Our son will turn 11 years old in April 2023 and only has a second-grade education. He showers once or twice a month at the public showers in the marina. There is no toilet on the boat, he pees in a cup and has frequent accidents because he is afraid to go to the public restroom alone at night and it's too far away to get there in time. Before his kidnapping, his father insisted on buying a life insurance policy on our son "in case he drowns".

During our time together, my son told me he was being bullied and miserable in school and had so much anxiety because he was so far behind the other kids in his class.

On December 16, 2022, the father was "unable to join us on our current reservations" because he "had to work". He gave me a travel letter permitting me to travel to Canada with our son.

When I asked him if he had purchased another flight for himself, and if he had purchased the return tickets for himself and our son to fly back from Vancouver to Los Angeles, California, after the holidays in time for our son to go back to school on January 3, 2023, he replied: "not yet".

Christmas was magical! It was our first Christmas in 8 years and we had a wonderful time together. We played in the snow and enjoyed being home together at last. He loved hanging out in his bedroom, he was thrilled to have his very own bathroom, and he had so much fun playing with Maverick, our Labradoodle. He played video games and finished all the Lego sets he got for Christmas. We cooked our dinners and watched Sponge Bob together every night before bed. My son felt completely at home.

During the holidays I raised my child's safety concerns regarding his living conditions with his father's family. My ex-mother-in-law agreed that our son should live with me in Vancouver. She attempted to negotiate a settlement agreement that I was happy to agree to, but her son did not respond.

On December 26, 2022, the father wrote the following text to me and our son:

"your mom doesn't want to give you back to me to come back home to America....so there may be some serious ramifications... meaning... your mom... or me... goes to jail... and you go to child protective services and never see either of us again... that's your mom's decision. She could single-handedly ruin 3 lives."

Our abuser never made any assurances that he would do anything to improve our son's living conditions, and he never made arrangements to pick up our son after the holidays. He never bought his flight to Vancouver, or the return flights back to California as originally planned.

He left our son with me in Vancouver, returned to work and texted me saying:

"I know my son is safe with you, go ahead and homeschool him for the 5th grade until I come with the Vancouver police and charge you with kidnapping."

Five weeks later, that is exactly what he did. Knowing our son did not want to return to the boat in Marina del Rey, he decided to punish him by coming to Vancouver unannounced and bringing the Vancouver police to "assist" him. As promised, the father also had me arrested and charged with abduction. My son is now back at the boat, being punished for wanting to live with me and I'm being punished for trying to protect my son from his horrendous living conditions, abusive father and the very real threat that child protective services will take him at any moment.

Here is Episode 1 of "Help Me Rescue My Kidnapped Son" a Video Podcast I am creating to explain my story:

Thanks to generous donations from this fundraiser I have hired an excellent criminal defense attorney to help me fight the completely bogus abduction charge. I'm very confident the charge will be dropped before trial because there was no abduction. The father permitted our son to fly with me to Canada and permitted our son to stay with me at my home in Vancouver but didn't pick him back up as originally planned. I had lawful custody of our son because the father acknowledged our son was safe with me, permitted me to homeschool him and left him with me for another 5 weeks before he showed up with the police unannounced. My abuser falsely accused me of abduction to circumvent the family court and try to prevent me from fighting for custody of our son.

If anyone can help get our story to the media, the publicity would help me rescue my son and raise awareness about this horrific form of legal abuse, coercive control, criminal harassment, and child abuse so we can create policies and procedures and proper safeguards so this type of criminal harassment and child abduction can be prevented. I will spend the rest of my life working to make sure that what is happening to me and my son simply can't happen anymore. There are no protections, resources or assistance for victims of criminal harassment and kidnapping, especially when it happens internationally. We have the laws and treaties in place already, but we don't have the policies and procedures, oversight, victims' assistance and legal remedies or trained law enforcement, prosecutors or judiciary to ensure the laws and treaties are followed. I'm working to change all that.

Please donate and share this fundraiser so I can take all the necessary actions to rescue my son and finally get the long-awaited justice my son and I both deserve. I will continue to update everyone throughout this journey. Thank you for your support!

Thank you!