Federal authorities see an uptick in child abductions as part of family disputes.
Houston sees uptick in alleged kidnappings by family members
In 2012, Dr. Chris Brann lived with his wife and toddler near Houston’s medical center. Within a year, his now-ex wife had taken their son to her native Brazil and never returned.
Today, legal appeals through international treaties have failed to return Brann’s son, leaving the 36-year-old physician with little hope in an international dispute experts say is becoming more common in the U.S.
“At some point, there is nothing left to do but to ask for help,” Brann said, choking with emotion, en route from Houston to Washington, D.C., for a news conference held with hope of trying his case in the media. “That’s what I’m doing.”
Federal authorities who mediate international family disputes have noted an uptick in demand, said Laura Dale, a board-certified family law attorney with a practice in Houston. She cited a fiveday seminar held in Washington last week by the American Bar Association on the topic of international family law, where she recalled that State Department officials told the class there have been higher incidences as foreign-born populations grow in American cities.
“It’s a huge topic if we’re listening to speakers on the issue for a week,” she said. Almost 800 cases of international child abduction from the United States are outstanding.
Houston, Dale said, is a hotbed for alleged international child abductions by a parent, given that a larger portion of Houstonians also have homes abroad than residents of any other major American city.
In the Bayou City, Brann’s dreams turned nightmares. He met Marcelle Guimarares, now 35, in a graduate Health Care Finance study group at Rice University in 2004, and they started dating in 2005. In 2008 they married, and they delivered Nico at Memorial Hermann Hospital in 2009.
Brann said he had always wanted a son and fondly recounted the late nights he would spend tending to his crying infant, cradling the boy and gazing at him. He was finely attuned to address the baby, he said, as hospital residency had trained him to wake at any hour at the sound of a pager.
But the romance went sour. Different ideologies drove the couple apart, Brann said. Guimarares cited “irreconcilable differences” when she filed for divorce in 2012.
They shared equal custody of Nico until Guimarares asked permission to take him to visit her parents near Salvador, Brazil, and signed a legal pledge to return on schedule. Days before her return, she asked for more time, while she secretly sought full custody of Nico in Brazil.
Then Brann’s attorney called to tell him: “They’re going to run with the child.” Brann felt shocked and helplessly robbed of his son.
In his quest to protest, he discovered only the State Department could mediate with a foreign government. It does so under the 1980 Hague Abduction Convention, a treaty signed by 73 nations, including the U.S. and Brazil.
“If a parent abducts a child in a country that is a Hague Abduction Convention partner, we work with that country to return the child to his or her place of habitual residence,” a State Department official said in an email Monday. “A court in the country of habitual residence can then resolve the question of custody.”
But international law so far has done little for Brann. Two years of appeals in Brazilian courts show little hope of resolution; meanwhile, he fears his now-juvenile son is growing into a life and language in which Brann cannot take part.
Rumblings of Brann’s story reached the ear of Jared Genser, a Washington, D.C.-based attorney and managing director at Perseus Strategies, a public interest law firm with a focus on international human rights. He reached out and took the case.
Genser said Guimaraes fraudulently won custody of Nico using forged documents to prove he had attended Brazilian school for months longer than he had been in the country in 2013. After Brann’s plea for extradition of his son, a judge ruled that the boy was well settled in his new life.
Genser also noted Guimarares had financial help from her millionaire father, Carlos Guimaraes, president of commodities trader ED&F Man Brasil and former vice president of Dow Chemical Company in Houston, who bought his daughter’s round-trip tickets from Houston to Brazil in 2013.
Court documents show the Brazilian executive branch ruled against Nico’s retention in Brazil, but a judiciary appealed.
“If the court rules against the family,” the state department of- ficial said, “the family can file a case for access — visitation and contact — to the child.”
That’s what Brann has now. The Brazilian court granted him a half day of visitation under armed supervision every other day while he visits the country. In the last two years, he’s normalized working constant overtime to afford 15 trips to Brazil.
“I go down there and have my heart broken every time,” he said. “Nico always cries.”
Brann has remarried and plans to have more children. But he hasn’t moved on. At his home near Reliant Park, his son’s blankets, toys and clothes sit exactly as they did the day Nico left his baby blue, ocean-themed bedroom.
The only things missing are Nico’s photographs and a drawings, which Guimaraes took with her.