A Father's Love (14 page)

I wondered why my attorneys in Brazil didn't know that Bruna had died. She had died on August 22; Wendy and Vanessa discovered the message and news article on September 1, a full ten days later. Clearly, Bruna's family members did not want the news of her death to get out too quickly—especially to America. But none of this mattered to me at the moment. We had to get a plan together.

I didn't have Ricardo's phone number with me, so I called my sister to get the number and then called Ricardo in his office in São Paulo that night and asked him if he had heard anything about Bruna's death. He had not; he had not seen it in the newspapers, and he'd received no notice from the court. Apparently the Lins e Silvas had been successful in squelching the news. Nevertheless, he immediately responded, “It's over.”

Driving home, I was overcome with a flood of emotions. It was now late into the night and I was exhausted from a fourteen-hour day at sea. This new information was a lot to come to grips with, to say the least. Memories poured over me, memories of how Bruna and I had met, the first time we expressed our love for each other, and so many wonderful, joyous experiences we and our families shared. What had happened? And what was yet happening? I had to shake it off, had to stay focused, to keep myself in the present. I couldn't go back there in my thoughts, trying to relive the past. It was too draining, and it was of no use anyhow. I needed every ounce of sanity, energy, and strength to do whatever needed to be done to help Sean. Yet I had a feeling that something bigger and more powerful than all of us was taking control.

I promised Ricardo I would get to Brazil as soon as possible. Then I called Tricia Apy in New Jersey and informed her of Bruna's death. “We're done,” she said. “We're done. We have to be done, because a fit biological parent always trumps a third party.”

After speaking to Ricardo about the Brazilian law covering such matters, Tricia said, “It's over. You are the surviving parent. They have no choice now but to send Sean home.” I thanked Tricia for her assessment and positive comments and hurried to make travel arrangements to Brazil. Within three days, along with my mom and my friend Tony Rizzuto, I was on my way.

I thought it would be especially good to have Mom accompany me, since Sean would benefit from another warm and compassionate family member with maternal instincts. Mom had loved Bruna at one time and was deeply saddened by her former daughter-in-law's death. Although she disliked flying, she wanted to make the trip with me.

During the long ten-hour flight, anxious reminders of past trips haunted me. I couldn't help recalling the time my dad and I went through the “dog and pony show” of meeting judges and attending one of the many court hearings regarding Sean in Brazil. One particular judge arrived at the federal superior court thirty minutes late, wearing big gaudy sunglasses. She acted as though she were a rock star. When it was her turn to speak about our case, she huffed, “I've been too busy to read all this paperwork, but I've received a beautiful photo collection of this boy and his mother. My own mother died less than a year ago, and I still lie awake at night missing her. The mother is the most important bond in a child's life. My decision will be for the boy to stay with his mother, and I'll figure out a way to make a legal decision for this to happen.”

Unbelievable! She openly admitted that she had not read the files, but her mind was already made up. While she spoke, women in white waitress outfits served coffee and biscuits to her and the other judges, right there in the courtroom during the hearing.
What kind of place is this?
I wondered. Clearly, the narcissism and sense of entitlement were not exclusive to Sean's captors. Even as we flew to Brazil following Bruna's death, I worried that we might encounter similar attitudes among the authorities whose decisions affected Sean and me.

 

 

WE ARRIVED IN São Paulo the morning of September 7, 2008, and made our way to Rio, talking in subdued tones about how we now hoped that this long, painful ordeal would finally end and we could bring Sean home with us.

After several unanswered calls to Bruna's parents and to Lins e Silva, we contacted the attorneys representing Sean's captors to see if we could arrange for my mom and me to visit with Sean, to express our condolences to the family and to comfort Sean. The kidnappers refused to allow Mom or me to see Sean at all. Nor would any of the family members accept our phone calls.

“David flew here and tried to take Sean back,” they claimed. “We haven't even had time to mourn yet, and he's already taking us to court.”

In fact, they had already been to court on two separate occasions since Bruna died, in an effort to get my name removed from a Brazilian birth certificate they had obtained for Sean. When Ricardo sought to enter a plea on my behalf, we discovered that Lins e Silva had already petitioned the Brazilian state court on August 28, less than a week after Bruna's death. He asked the court to declare him Sean's legal guardian and to remove my name and all references to my family name from Sean's Brazilian birth certificate, and to change Sean's name to Sean Bianchi Lins e Silva. The petition asserted that I had “abandoned” Sean, so that upon his mother's death he was in effect an “orphan.”

Nevertheless, Lins e Silva's efforts must have been quite convincing, because shortly after arriving in Brazil, I was hit with shocking news: the courts had already granted João Paulo Lins e Silva temporary guardianship of my child! Later I saw television interviews with Silvana in which she referred to Sean as “Little John,” as though he were João Paulo Lins e Silva's son. More than a year later, when the Ribeiros returned some of the clothes they had purchased for Sean, on the labels they had designated him as “Sean Bianchi.”
Poor Sean
, I thought.
It's a wonder my son can even remember his real name: Sean Richard Goldman.

It was as though, immediately upon Bruna's death, Lins e Silva—a man with no blood relation to my son, and whose retention of him after Bruna's death was determined by the court to be unlawful, was attempting to erase my existence and disconnect me from Sean. To lend credibility to Lins e Silva's application, the Ribeiros had joined him in the request.

Ricardo informed me that Lins e Silva was arguing something he and his father, Brazil's leading family law attorney, called “socioaffective paternity,” claiming that because Sean had been living with him in Brazil for four years, Lins e Silva was now the most qualified person to raise my son. They said that Sean should not be returned to me because for the past four years I had not had a relationship with him. That argument would be tantamount to saying that because Jaycee Lee Dugard was kidnapped in 1991 when she was only eleven years old, and lived with her kidnappers, Phillip and Nancy Garrido, for eighteen years, the kidnappers were therefore the most qualified to raise her! Or that since Elizabeth Smart was apparently so frightened she didn't make any real attempt to flee her abductors, Brian Mitchell and Wanda Barzee, they should be allowed to keep her.

Essentially, the Lins e Silvas had convinced the court that if you kidnap a child and keep him away from his biological parent long enough, he should stay with his kidnappers, because those are the people he knows best and with whom he is most comfortable. To me, it was an absurd argument, yet without any attempt at providing notice to me, the Brazilian court permitted the filing to proceed.

The request to issue a new birth certificate for Sean was outrageous in my opinion, and that a court in any country would seriously consider such a thing when I was still living and making every effort to have Sean returned to me was a mockery.

I talked to Wendy by phone and tried to describe the twisted turn of events.

“Please, David,” she pleaded with me. “Get out of that crazy place and just come home.”

“I can't leave yet,” I said. “I have to file an amended application with the Brazilian Central Authority, under the Hague Convention abduction rules, naming this new guy, João Lins e Silva, as an additional kidnapper wrongfully retaining Sean in collusion with the Ribeiros.”

Bruna was dead. Despite the Brazilian court's willingness to entertain the most ridiculous motions by the Lins e Silvas, we had another chance. I couldn't give up now.

M
OST OF US HAVE EXPERIENCED NIGHTMARES AT ONE TIME OR another in our lives. They can be frightening and upsetting, but usually the dawn of a fresh new day dispels the power of the images that haunted us the night before. The nightmare that began the day Bruna informed me that she and Sean would not be coming back, however, lost none of its power as it reran in my mind almost every night while I tossed and turned and tried to sleep. Worse yet, when I awakened the next day, the nightmare would still be there, and Sean was still in Brazil, now living with a man who claimed that he had more rights to raise my son than I had, even though he was not a blood relation to Sean. This same man, in collusion with my former in-laws, continued to defy the laws of two nations and a major treaty agreed upon by eighty nations.

 

 

TONY RIZUTTO HAD to get back to New Jersey to work and to take care of his three daughters. My mom and I stayed in Brazil from September 7 to September 20 and were rebuffed at every attempt to see Sean. Mom even wrote a letter to Silvana, as one grandmother to another, expressing her deep sadness at Bruna's passing. She received no reply. Through Ricardo, I repeatedly attempted to set up a time when I could at least speak to my son, to hear his voice and see his face. The response from Bruna's Brazilian husband and her parents was always the same. Through their attorneys, they denied any contact between Sean and me or Sean and my mom, his paternal grandmother.

Knowing the law, Ricardo told me that I
should
be able to see Sean. I knew better than to get too excited. I hadn't seen the law followed in Brazil yet. Nothing in this case so far had gone as it
should
have, whether under Brazilian, U.S., or international law. Worse still, the recent court proceedings and personal rebuffs we'd received had given us even greater cause for concern and had reinforced our belief that the unending appeals and court filings allowed by the Brazilian legal system could stymie justice from ever being served. When Ricardo learned that Bruna's Brazilian husband had not filed for custody of Sean, but instead had filed to actually replace me on a birth certificate issued for Sean in Brazil, he was irate. “This procedure is clearly an invalid application of Brazilian law,” he railed. “There are ex-wives, there are ex-husbands, but ex-parents do not and cannot exist!” Nevertheless, the request was received and processed by the Rio de Janeiro State Court. The only assurance Ricardo could provide regarding the potential outcome of this action was that it
should
not be successful. I was learning the hard way that what
should be
and what
are
may often be two separate matters when it came to Brazil's judicial system.

For example, in Brazil, a public prosecutor is assigned to analyze every case and submit a formal written opinion to the court. In a strange sort of ritual, both defendants and plaintiffs are allowed to meet with the prosecutors or judges presiding over a case. Some would refuse Ricardo's request to meet with us, while others accepted.

The meetings were always conducted in Portuguese, without an English translator. Although I was picking up more and more of the language, my Portuguese was still grossly inadequate, so usually I sat mute while Ricardo and the judges or prosecutors discussed my case. For one such meeting, I flew from São Paulo to Rio early in the morning. After waiting in a hallway for several hours, we were finally able to meet with the public prosecutor, a woman I guessed to be a few years older than me.

Following a cordial introduction, Ricardo and the woman began discussing my case, while I sat in an adjacent chair saying nothing. I listened intently as Ricardo presented the facts, going step by step, and relating his argument to the rules of the law. The public prosecutor suddenly cut him short and smiled at me. Gesturing toward me as she continued to smile at me broadly, she said in Portuguese, “He will never see his son again. The boy will remain with Mr. Lins e Silva, who is more qualified as a father, and the boy has been here for so long that he belongs here. Have a nice day. Good-bye.” She had no idea that I could understand her evil comments. She got up, indicating the meeting was over.

I rose as well, hoping against hope that I had misunderstood what I'd heard, but I could tell from Ricardo's body language that I was close enough in my comprehension. I refused, however, to sink to the level of Sean's captors or those, like this woman, who were protecting them. Instead, I pointed to a photograph on her desk. The picture was of a boy about thirteen or fourteen years old.
“Sua Fighlio?”
I asked. Your son?

The prosecutor grabbed the picture and kissed it, then with both hands pressed it to her heart as she exclaimed in Portuguese, “Yes, yes. My beautiful, beautiful son. I love him so much. He is my world, my baby, my angel.” She seemed fully aware of the hypocrisy and cruelty she was demonstrating.

Ricardo realized that even if I didn't understand every word, I had a grasp of what was going on. He hurried me out of the office and offered an apology. He was beginning to feel personally ashamed for his country's behavior.

 

 

AFTER NEARLY THREE exasperating weeks, I felt desperate for help. While sitting in a hotel room in São Paulo, I decided to write a letter to my elected officials in New Jersey, and to the local media outlets in my home state and New York. In the letter, I outlined the events that had brought me nearly to despair after more than four years of struggling against a confusing and seemingly one-sided legal system in Brazil.