Thread: Family Fights Odds, Retrieving Kidnapped Girl

[quote]In New York, he had been an absent father and abusive husband who worked erratically at makeshift jobs. But his calls and e-mail messages from China, where he had gone in the fall of 2007 to teach English, promised his estranged wife that everything had changed. Their little girl deserved the chance to grow up in a two-parent family, he told her, and he sent them airline tickets to join him.


Michael Appleton for The New York Times
Guadalupe Guzman and granddaughter after the child’s arrival at Kennedy Airport.
The day after they arrived in Beijing in January of this year, said the wife, Olivia Karolys, the husband, Rodrigo Karolys, took them shopping in a mall far from their hotel, and told her to get her hair done. She watched his reflection in the salon mirror as he held Lenora, then 2 ½.

Then suddenly they were gone.

Over the next nine months Ms. Karolys, 24, would have many despairing days as she searched for her abducted child, but the terror of those first hours was an abyss. “I was utterly lost,â€

In the end, it took an extraordinary international effort, including months of legal and diplomatic advocacy, criminal investigation and Internet sleuthing, to locate the child — who was found on Sunday, abandoned in an orphanage many miles from Beijing — and bring her safely home to New York. She and her mother arrived at Kennedy International Airport on Thursday night, amid balloons and tears.

that allows the abused spouse of a United States citizen to apply for legal permanent residency.

A happier ending would be if the illegals family all went back to Mexico and stopped burdening the American tax payers.

I agree with you ELE. A lot of resources that were spent on this one case. And wouldn't she need a visa or papers to go to China from the USA? She was already in this country illegally . Passport? Was she a citizen already since she married to a US citizen?