Lonely dad lives death
ANNAPOLIS, Maryland (AP): When the mother of Michael Shannon’s two sons abducted them and hustled them out of the country to Egypt, she accomplished two things: turning the boys against their father and guaranteeing he wouldn’t stop trying to get them back. And he hasn’t. He sought recourse with the police, the courts, even the State Department, winning victories small and large along the way. But what’s a father to do when a foreign country refuses to recognize international child custody laws? When his own government has no leverage to force the children’s return or prevent them from being spirited to yet another country? Michael Shannon has no playbook for this.
The abduction of Adam and his younger brother Jason, he says, has left a deadening void.
“I haven’t felt hate, anger, angst, love, anything. It was a complete death,” Shannon says. “There’s no emotions. It’s just, time is irrelevant. I go to work, and I read my books and I wait.”
Shannon and his attorneys have been working steadily over the years to exhaust legal options – if not to get the boys back now then at least to show how much he cares about them.
“It’s the only focus I have left in my life,” Shannon says.
Shannon, a 47-year-old computer consultant, has never been very excited about the $3 million (1.9 million euros) in legal damages a Maryland court ordered his ex-wife and her mother to pay for abducting the boys nearly seven years ago. It was precedent-setting, yet he doesn’t expect to see the money, and he doesn’t feel like he’s any closer to seeing his sons.
“I just keep plodding along. It’s never over.”
Shannon separated from his wife, Nermeen Khalifa, in January 2000, after nearly four years of marriage. A Maryland court granted him custody of Adam, and Khalifa was granted custody of Jason. Shannon had visitation rights with Jason, who was only months old, and was later given custody of him by a Maryland court.
In August 2001, Shannon let both sons go with Khalifa and her mother, Afaf N. Khalifa, to visit a cousin in New York. But the boys were put on a plane to Egypt and when Shannon went to pick them up at the time they were due back in Maryland, he found an empty apartment.
“My life ended on the day I walked up to that apartment,” he says. “What I was before that died that day.”
Jason was a toddler, Adam just beginning to grow into his own when their dad would take them to hockey games – his older son from a previous marriage was playing. How the younger boys loved it, always wanting to get on the ice with their brother.
Father’s Day,
Halloween, Christmas – all have little meaning, other than to remind Shannon of what used to be, what is no more. There are no toys laying around his modest home in Millersville. Holiday decorations stay in their boxes.
“I just don’t bring them down anymore,” Shannon says. “It’s a bad reminder.”
Instead, files are piled on his desk and bookcase. Numerous family photos capture the children – Jason in infancy, Adam the preschooler – on Santa’s lap, happy, frozen in time.
Only two dates on the calendar are of any significance: Jason’s birthday on Jan. 10 and Adam’s on Feb 9. Adam turned 11 this year, Jason 7.
Aggressive assistance from Maryland authorities has yielded legal victories and Shannon’s attorneys have even worked with international authorities to get the boys back. But, he says, the State Department hasn’t helped much. He feels he’s been met with indifference.
He has no idea what the children look like today. His ex-wife calls him about once every two months on average, and sometimes she puts one of the boys on the phone, but Shannon says he can’t tell for certain if it’s really his sons.
He worries about how efforts to turn them against him will affect their relationships when the boys get older. Shortly after they were abducted, Shannon recalls a phone conversation when Adam told him that he hoped “bulldozers and tanks” would knock down his house.
“Next to burying your children, it’s every parent’s worst nightmare,” he said. “I don’t know if their attitudes will ever change.”
One positive legal development came in 2002. The boys’ maternal grandmother, who is the wife of a wealthy Egyptian businessman, was arrested that year while vacationing in California. She stood trial in Maryland and was convicted and sentenced to 10 years in prison for helping to abduct the boys. She served about three years before being paroled.
In April, Maryland’s highest court upheld $3 million (1.9 million euros) in compensatory and punitive damages that were awarded by a lower court in the state.
Stephen Cullen, an attorney who has been representing Shannon for six years, described the ruling as the first legal remedy of its kind to define monetary damages for interfering with custody and visitation rights in an international abduction case.
Usually, legal custody cases emphasize the best interests of the children. The damages awarded to Shannon indicated that the courts care about the parent’s loss as well, said Cullen, who specializes in international child abduction cases.
“That has never existed before, and it’s his perseverance that has gotten that,” Cullen said. “Other parents will benefit from that.”
Police have issued a warrant for Shannon’s ex-wife, who has dual US and Egyptian citizenship.
William C. Brennan, an attorney representing Khalifa, declined to comment, because the criminal case is still open.
Since 1988, the government has opened files on more than 13,000 cases of international child abduction. Parents can spend years trying to get them back, often with no luck.
Shannon’s efforts to get Egyptian courts to enforce Maryland court orders have been useless.
The problem, Cullen said, is that Egypt does not recognize the 1980 Hague Abduction Treaty, which includes about 80 countries that enforce child custody laws in the United States.
No Muslim countries recognize it, Cullen said, and he has been working to create an arrangement for Shannon where the two boys would be brought to
Cyprus, which is both Christian and Muslim. It is the only hope Shannon has of seeing his sons.
“Eventually, the boys will have to come home,” he says. “(But) they’ll always be foreigners in a foreign country.”
Arab Times :: Lonely dad lives death
Lonely dad lives death
