Frances Twitty
A Toronto judge has sentenced a 62-year-old mother to six months in jail for abducting her young son and hiding him from his father for 12 years.
Mr. Justice Todd Ducharme of the Superior Court of Ontario said that the consequences are calamitous when an estranged parent uses a child as a weapon of marital warfare.
Family-law conflicts turn ordinarily reasonable people into aggressive litigants who will stop at nothing to get their way, he said: "Too often, the litigants are people who, having once loved another, now interact motivated by spite, stubbornness, anger or hatred. Reasonable persons caught up in such litigation may treat each other terribly."
The defendant, Fairlene Melville, went underground in Florida after the abduction, severing relations with her extended relatives and home-schooling the child to help keep his presence known to as few people as possible.
Meanwhile, the boy's father, Joshua Fried, scoured a broad geographical area looking for him, including following up leads and tips in New York, New Jersey, Mexico, Jamaica and the Cayman Islands.
After her son turned 17, Ms. Melville – who immigrated to Canada from Jamaica at the age of 14 and had four children with two other husbands – returned to Toronto and turned herself in to police.
Ms. Melville claimed that she had to take the boy because Mr. Fried had been abusive to them both and had made threats to her.
While Judge Ducharme accepted the possibility that there had been a handful of modestly abusive situations, he said he did not believe the bulk of Ms. Melville's accusations and justifications.
"The timing of the abduction is interesting," he said. "Ms. Melville abducted her son in the face of increasing access being awarded to Mr. Fried. I find that she did this not to protect herself or her son from serious abuse, but rather to thwart Mr. Fried's access to his son which the family court had determined was in the best interests of the child."
As a result of the abduction, Judge Ducharme said Mr. Fried was put through psychological hell for 12 years and lost the opportunity to have a relationship with his growing son.
"Not only is this a loss to the child, but it is also every parent's worst nightmare," he said. "It was clearly a very bad decision, and it was one that Ms. Melville could have undone every day for 12 years. On every one of those days, she chose not to end the abduction."
Judge Ducharme said that a defence proposal that Ms. Melville receive a conditional sentence was absurd. He said parental abductions strike at the heart of the legal system, since they are usually an attempt to circumvent a direct court order.
"In a system that is meant to focus on the best interests of the child, the child can be reduced to a weapon used by warring parents to bludgeon each other," the judge said.
Ms. Melville's jail sentence will be followed by two years of probation and 120 hours of community service.