Idaho Father and Mother get pregnant. Father and Mother get engaged.

Six months into the pregnancy, Mother calls the engagement off, breaks up with Father and cuts Father out of her life completely.

Father claims to contact state department of health and welfare to find out how to protect his rights to his child. They supposedly tell him he must wait until baby is born.

Next thing Father knows, he hears Mother’s baby has been adopted. Without a word to him.

Father took his case all the way to the Idaho Supreme Court. But he lost.

Because he didn’t timely register with Idaho’s Putative Father Registry. Because he says he didn’t know about it.

A number of states, including Florida, now have a putative father registry scheme and a requirement to timely register with it to assert parental rights and block any adoption.

Despite Father’s wishes, Mother says it was best for the baby to put it up for adoption.

Read more in this [Pocatello, ID] KPVI TV 6 news article: Man Loses Son in Adoption Without His Consent.

A Japanese man divorces his wife without warning.

The Wife is enraged – and kills him … sort of.

The marriage and divorce took place in a Korean video game which the Japanese man and woman both played in online.

The murder was virtual, of the character the man played online. The real woman, a piano teacher, logged in as the man and, using his identity, killed off his character.

So, it was all just a game … or was it?

Japanese authorities have arrested the woman – for illegally accessing a computer and manipulating data.

The charges carry a maximum penalty of five years in prison and a $5,000 fine.

A sobering reality.

Read more in this BBC [UK] news article: Woman in jail over virtual murder and this San Diego Tribune article: ‘Virtual murder’ in online game lands Japanese woman in jail.

Today is National Adoption Day. In fact, the entire month of November is National Adoption Month.

As part of his legacy, an adoptee’s foundation offers a Foster Care Adoption Awareness Toolkit to agencies, civic and religous groups, corporations, teachers and others.

The kit promotes adoption of children in foster care and publicizes the need for adoptive families for well over 100,000 abandoned, abused or neglected children. The kit also addresses myths about adopting kids out of foster care.

The adoptee behind the Foundation is the late Dave Thomas, the founder of Wendy’s restaurants. And the Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption is the only foundation dedicated exclusively to foster care adoption.

Read more in this Wall Street Journal Market Watch press release: Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption Offers Free Foster Care Adoption Awareness Toolkits

Police showed up at a home where a Mother and Father were engaged in a physical fight over a custody dispute.

The police informed both parents that their disagreement would have to be resolved in court, which is another way of saying that law enforcement personnel can’t settle things between them.

But the pair were intent on their own alternative means of resolving their dispute.

Just minutes later, the police were summoned to a scene on the road where the same couple were now duking it out in the outdoors.

Both exhibited fresh injuries.

Police arrested both parents and charged them both with assault.

Mother had to post bail to get out of jail but not Father.

The whereabouts and care of the children over whom all this fighting was taking place did not come up at all.

Read more in this [Delmarva, MD] WBOC 16 TV News article: Pair Arrested for Fighting in Road.

Couple meet when woman works as picker on man’s potato farm. They marry.

Nineteen years later, when Wife is sixty years old, Wife accuses her wealthy husband of cheating on her.

Husband is apparently offended. Husband asks for divorce – at ninety-one years old.

Wife asks the court for alimony and possession of the marital home.

Read more in this [Macedonia] Makfax article: 91-year-old Italian seeks divorce from 60-year-old wife.

Two years ago, a noncustodial Michigan parent snatched a child from school.

Now, would-be visitors trying to gain entrance into at least one Michigan school find it nearly as difficult as getting into a courthouse.

School visitors are “managed” by a dedicated computerized terminal running “visitor management” software.

Visitors must be processed through the terminal, which scans the guests’ driver’s licenses and compares the identities of the licensees against a national database of sex offenders. If the visitors are not in the sex offender database, the terminal prints visitor passes with photo identifications.

That’s the easy part.

The “intelligent” software terminal also maintains child custody and timesharing information, to “manage” child pickup disputes between parents (and potentially others) as well. That sounds as though it must require interpreting as well as enforcing parental timesharing legal rights.

All done by software … in the name of school safety … and if the terminal gets it wrong? ….

Read more about this brave new world in this Muskegon [MI] Chronicle article: Securing our schools.

It began as an ordinary family outing in the car.

Aunt was driving the car. Mother was a passenger.

An off-duty police officer appeared out of the blue and found eight year old Boy on the hood of Aunt’s car … while the vehicle was moving.

According to Aunt, Boy was stubborn and would not climb down from the hood – after jumping on while the vehicle was already moving.

According to Aunt, law enforcement arrived just as she was going to stop and physically remove the Boy from the hood.

Next thing she knew, the police charged her with criminal recklessness and Mother with neglect of a dependent.

And Child Protective Services was there to take Boy and his cousin.

Although Aunt concedes Boy may have been in danger, Aunt believes police overreacted.

Aunt and Mother each face criminal hearings and child custody hearings soon.

Read more in this [Indianapolis] WTHR 13 TV News article: Mother, aunt arrested after boy rides on car hood.

Mother and Father divorce. Each remarries.

But they are both still jockeying for custody of their two kids.

Follow closely.

E-mails sent from Mother’s new husband’s e-mail account contain religious slurs and threats against Mother … and the kids. One message, sent to one of their children, intimidates, if not threatens, their kids.

Who sent the messages? One might be tempted to say Mother … or her new husband.

But Mother alleges that Father … and his new wife …, using information gleaned from “keylogging” software, hacked into an e-mail account of Mother’s new husband’s, and sent the messages from her new husband’s e-mail account.

Mother also alleges that one of the sending computers was a state-owned computer … used by Father’s new wife in her government job.

As luck would have it, Father’s new wife recently quit her job with the state, under scrutiny over use of government equipment in personal matters.

It was alleged that the questionable e-mails were used in an attempt to defraud the Family Court into favoring Father for custody.

Read more in this Nashville City Paper article: Nashville at Law: Lawsuit alleges former TennCare employee under investigation.

A Chicago area child was recently abducted by her father – who allegedly planned to take her to Jordan. Had the father succeeded, the baby girl would likely not have returned home to the US – or seen her US family members again.

Jordan is not a signatory to the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction – and custody laws there favor fathers. But the pair didn’t make it there. And the child was home in about a week.

Almost 800,000 children were reported missing in the US in 1999, the time of the last major survey.

And of them, only a handful, 115, were kidnapped by a stranger, for ransom or murder, the kind of kidnapper that most people think of when they think of a “kidnapper”.

115 … out of 800,000.

In child kidnappings, the reality is that the kidnapper is 4 times more likely to be a family member than a stranger, like this baby girl’s father.

In fact, half of child kidnappers are the children’s biological fathers. One quarter, their biological mothers.

But the fact that the kidnapper is a parent or other close relative does not mean that the child victim is safe, in good hands.

Nearly half of family abductions are foiled within a week. Only one-fifth of such cases remain unsolved after a month.

But where things tend to get more complicated is where the family member abductor whisks the child out of the country, particularly to a country that is not a signatory to the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction. As the Chicago girl’s father reportedly planned to do.

It can take much longer to retrieve those children … if they can even be retrieved at all.

Read more in this Chicago Southtown Star article: Most parental kidnappings end with child back home.

Affluent suburban New York couple appear to have it all. Husband owns a high end jewelry store.

Wife is a nutritionist in suburban schools. Married 18 years, the couple have a 12 year old daughter and a 14 year old boy.

Then something changes. The couple is getting a divorce.

And then Wife disappears. Nearly a month goes by, without a word from her, yet no sign of a body or injury.

The Husband comes under immediate suspicion of police. And, before long, of neighbors.

Finally, the Husband reportedly confesses. Husband is charged with murder.

The couple’s two children have been taken into child protective custody.

Read more about this case, and the sidebar recalling several other recent domestic violence murders in the region, in this [Lower Hudson Valley, NY] Journal News article – Cops: Cortlandt husband admits killing missing wife.