‘It is a nightmare’
Kitchener mom fights for the return of her abducted young sons from Poland
She did her best to do the right thing for her sons. But her good will became her downfall. Yaquelin Tamayo of Kitchener has been separated from her husband for five years. She agreed to joint custody and co-parenting with their sons, Andrez and Diego. She thought it would be better for the boys to have both parents in their lives.
In the summer of 2016, she signed a letter giving permission for her ex to take the boys on vacation to the Dominican Republic. They had done this before, with no problems.
But this time, the children never returned.
Their father, Andrzej Szczudlo, took them to his native Poland and disappeared with them.
For the past 15 months, Tamayo has beaten a path to the courts in Canada and Poland, to the Canadian government and international police, trying to find her sons and get them back.
Now, despite having the courts on her side, she is exhausted and has run out of money.
“I don’t know where my children are,” she said. “It is a nightmare.”
Tamayo was born in Cuba and worked there as a nurse. She met Szczudlo while he was on vacation there. She married him 10 years ago and moved to Canada where their
sons were born.
She attended Conestoga College to get her qualifications as a practical nurse in Canada, while he worked at a power plant and as a home builder.
The marriage deteriorated and they decided to live apart, but still continued to co-operate as parents for their boys. Tamayo often worked nights at a Kitchener retirement home. Szczudlo looked after them while she was at work.
The night in July 2016 that they were supposed to return from their vacation in the Dominican Republic, she called Szczudlo, but there was no answer.
Perhaps they were tired from the journey and had gone to bed early, she thought. She tried again next morning at 7 a.m. Again there was no answer.
She started to worry that there had been an accident. She called the police, the hospital and finally the hotel in the Dominican Republic where they had stayed.
She was put through to immigration service officials who told her he had taken a flight to Germany with the boys, the day before their scheduled flight to Canada.
She hired Kitchener lawyer Kathleen Beattie and they immediately commenced legal action through The Hague Central Authority, which deals with international abduction of children.
She was granted sole custody of her children and a court order for their immediate return to her by the Ontario Court of Justice. Szczudlo was served with those orders by email, Beattie said.
He called Tamayo and told her she would never see her children again, Beattie said.
Tamayo pressed on and jumped through every legal hoop: She hired a Polish lawyer and won a petition for sole custody and return of her children in the Polish courts. She worked with the Canadian government and the international police agency Interpol. She got all the documents translated into Polish so that the work could proceed.
At one point, Interpol found the children in the Polish city of Zielona Gora, but Tamayo said they left the children with their father because he said they were fine with him.
Even after the Polish courts ordered the children back into her care, nothing was done because Szczudlo appealed, Tamayo said.
She won the appeal. But the courts still gave him two weeks to give them up. A June 9 message from Global Affairs Canada said that “the father was to return the children to the mother in Poland yesterday, but failed to, and today the children are not in school.”
Tamayo knew that would happen. “I said, ‘He will steal the children.’ I did the right things. Nobody hears me.”
She has seen or spoken to the boys, now 7 and 8, a few times since they were abducted. But she feels them slipping away.
“In April they were happy to see me,” she said.
But “back this past summer, they didn’t want to talk with me in English, just in Polish.” Tamayo can’t speak Polish. “My heart was broken,” she said.
After spending more than $20,000 on legal fees, translation services and travel, Tamayo has exhausted her resources. She is planning to ask members of her church to help her find the funds to continue.
Friends have also launched an online fundraising page at https://www.gofundme.com/ finding-yaquelins-missing-children
Lawyer Beattie can’t do any more for Tamayo because the Canadian court system has done all it can. She wishes the prime minister would intervene.
Tamayo wishes for the same. “I think Canada should have more power to help me out,” she said, her eyes filling with tears.
Meanwhile, Waterloo Regional Police say they are continuing to investigate. Global Affairs Canada says it is providing “consular assistance” to Tamayo but won’t release further details in order to protect the integrity of the case.
With each passing day, Tamayo’s chances of taking back her sons grow more faint.
It is heartbreaking, and profoundly unjust, that the victim of such a dreadful crime is expected to bear so much of the burden of solving it.