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Originally posted by margarita:
http://www.suburbanchicagonews.com/beaconnews/top/2_1_AU07_MAGED_S1.htm


Stranger in a strange land
Broken family's international tale plays out in Aurora



Donnell Collins / Sun news services
Maged El Sayed, an Egyptian doctor who married a Mexican woman he met online, recently woke up during a trip to Aurora to find his wife and girls gone.


By Matthew DeFour
Staff writer


AURORA — Last Monday, Maged El Sayed was supposed to be on a flight back to Egypt with his wife and two children after a two-month vacation in Aurora with his in-laws.

Instead, the 35-year-old pediatrician remains in this country, his first trip abroad having turned into a surreal nightmare.

On March 29, after spending what seemed to be a normal month with his extended family here, El Sayed awoke to find his wife and children missing, his passport and all of his money gone. He called police to report an abduction, but when his mother- and father-in-law returned home later in the day, they brought the police with them and summarily threw their son-in-law of two years into the street.

More than a month has passed since then, and El Sayed considers himself a "special tourist," having slept in the bushes, begged on the streets of Aurora and visited places most Americans themselves have never seen — including the Chicago office of the FBI.

El Sayed is not charged with any crime.

Instead, he has fallen victim to an unusual loophole in the civil justice system resulting from a domestic violence claim filed by his wife, Carolina Rojas Santana, a 35-year-old Mexican citizen.

"I can't go back to my country because I could lose my babies and my family," El Sayed said. "I came to America with a family, and I want to leave with a family."


Internet match


El Sayed's wife did not respond to an e-mail request to comment for this story, and her whereabouts cannot be confirmed.
The two met on the Internet in 2002 while she was living in Aurora and he was finishing his medical studies in Cairo. The couple married in Egypt in March 2004 and Santana gave birth to two girls, now 14 months and 5 months old.

El Sayed says as far as he could tell, his wife was happy in Egypt. Though not wealthy, he was able to afford his family a middle-class lifestyle, and he even hosted his wife's parents for 10 days last December.

But he says there was one constant dispute.

"Why don't we try to go work in America?" she would say to him, though he knew it wouldn't be possible without first obtaining work visas, which would take 13 years for a Mexican citizen or eight years for an Egyptian citizen.

He also reminded her that while she might not have any trouble staying with her family in Aurora, he is Muslim, and in a post-Sept. 11 world, such a move is impossible.

Even after they arrived in Aurora on March 1 for a vacation that cost $4,000 (or about a year's savings), he says his wife continued to discuss the possibility of overstaying their visitor visas, which expire on Aug. 15. Her family tried to help El Sayed look for possible day-laborer jobs in construction or farming, but he told them he didn't want to break the law.


Out on the street


After the disappearance of his family on the morning of March 29, as he began to panic about what happened, an investigator from the Illinois Department of Children & Family Services came to the house and surprised him with the news that his wife had filed a police report, claiming he had abused her and their children.
The DCFS and Aurora police investigations eventually "found no credible evidence of child abuse or neglect," according to DCFS documents, and determined the claim to be "unfounded." But when El Sayed's in-laws returned home that evening, he says they had changed "180 degrees" toward him.

The next day, El Sayed tried to tell the Aurora Police Department that his wife had kidnapped his children and stolen his passport. He told his story to the State Police and even the FBI, but without any luck.

Meanwhile, he wanted to conserve his money and decided to sleep outside the Aurora Transportation Center. In the following days, he says he managed to scrape together some money from the Egyptian embassy in Chicago, his family in Egypt and from people on the street, and rented a cheap room at the Galena Hotel in downtown Aurora.


Granted custody


At one point, Aurora police returned his passport but said they could not release any information on the whereabouts of his family. He tried to get answers at Aurora City Hall, but he was told he would need to hire a lawyer. He went to Prairie State Legal Services in Batavia but was told they could not represent his case. (El Sayed says he later learned they were representing his wife).
Finally, he went to the Kane County Judicial Center in Geneva, and, as he told a clerk his tale of woe, a lawyer overheard him and offered to help take his civil case to court.

On April 17, a Kane County judge issued an emergency order of protection that granted El Sayed temporary custody of the children and required Santana to turn over her passport so she couldn't flee the country to Mexico.

The order stated that Santana was residing at an unknown location, or "possibly Mutual Ground," the Aurora shelter for battered women, where El Sayed says one of Santana's relatives works.

But when El Sayed took the order back to the Aurora Police Department, he was told by Sgt. Marshall McQuinley in the Domestic Violence Reduction Unit that if his wife were seeking asylum at a battered women's shelter, there was nothing police could do.

"If a person is in a shelter of any kind," McQuinley said, "they do not have to notify the other parent of the location of the kids. Realistically, the person could stay there indefinitely."


Legal loophole


McQuinley said the problem boils down to "dueling statutes." Illinois law prohibits revealing the identity or whereabouts of a woman seeking shelter for domestic abuse. At the same time, police should be able to execute an order of protection.
Mutual Ground Executive Director Linda Healy, who could neither confirm nor deny whether Santana was staying there, said there was no legal contradiction because a shelter would not try to stop police from serving a warrant.

Still, it wasn't clear how police would obtain authority to search a shelter if there were no legal way to prove someone was staying there.

El Sayed's lawyer, who wished to remain unidentified, said he strongly believes that Santana is ruining the credibility of other women who need help.

Though McQuinley would not speculate about Santana's whereabouts, he said out of thousands of cases he has handled, "This is the first time that I have ever thought that the person seeking shelter is not the aggrieved party."

El Sayed was baffled.

"I don't know how there is a place above the law," El Sayed said. "I don't understand how America is the country that is responsible for the implementation of the law and liberty all over the world, and I can't implement a court order issued inside America."


No treaty with Egypt


El Sayed missed his flight on May 1 and continues to stay in Aurora with a Good Samaritan who took pity on him after hearing his story. He finally filed a child-abduction report with the Aurora Police Department, and he wants any accusations about his conduct toward his wife to be handled in a court.
If Santana wants a divorce, it will have to be handled in the Egyptian courts. Further complicating matters is that Egypt has not signed an international child-abduction treaty, which would allow El Sayed to return home to his job and allow Egyptian officials to work with American officials to solve the dispute.

According to a lawyer representing the in-laws, El Sayed had physically and verbally abused his wife in Egypt and was a "violent and abusive man." The lawyer said El Sayed had made anti-American statements to the father-in-law and had brought "radical" literature with him to America that was turned over to police.

El Sayed denies all of these accusations, saying his in-laws were playing off stereotypes. Police confirmed the parents turned over a copy of the Quran and other Islamic texts, which McQuinley described as no more radical than material found at a Christian bookstore.

El Sayed suspects his wife is trying hide behind a loophole in the American legal system until he gives up. But he says he will never give up, even if it ruins his life.

"American laws will never break my family," El Sayed said in an appeal to his wife. "Everyone can commit mistakes. Maybe she thinks she has started down a way and she's afraid to go back. But the way back is open."

05/07/06

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Yeah I'd like to hear the wife's side of the story too.

This reminds me of a certain bus-driver that I run into occassionally, she used to be on the #12 route, which I take to my mother's house occasionally.

She herself was married to a Mexican national. At a time she was working 2 full time jobs and he basically wasn't helping out, at all, even wasn't residing permenantly with her and her two kids.

He for a time went back to Mexico and married for a third time. He didn't bother to tell her the truth that he hadn't even divorced his first wife (she told me this was common). Marriages in the Northern part of Mexico are not filed with the authorities as often as the rest of Mexico.

So when they decided they were going to patch things up, she went down with the kids for a short 3 week vacation.

She didn't come back with them, the kids were going to stay the rest of the summer. Fine. They are bi-cultural kids.

But when she tried to bring them back in the fall for school. THey fought it and the Mexican authorities wouldn't help out.

So she filed for divorce to get legal precedence for custody. Still the authorities wouldn't help.

Later on, she became depressed and spent time in rehab(booze only, mostly depression). Her mother turned around behind her back went to the courts and filed a motion that she was an unfit mother and tried to gain custody. Her mother claimed that during her recovery it was pertainent that she carrry on and try to regain custody for her, when she succeeded she wouldl hand the kids over to her.

Well her psychiatrist went to court for her and testified that she was a fit mother and that her own mother didn't have such a stellar past herself, actually she lost custody of her children when this bus driver was growing up. (later on the federallees used this court fiasco as an excuse not to enforce a US court order). The grandma in question never did clean up, she is a worse alcoholic than her actual daughter and is just doing it out of spite.

In the mean time this bus driver lost contact with most of her extended family because she had aired "the family's dirty laundry" in court to fight her vindictive mother.

She lost friends, her two jobs, and her house.

Luckily, after fighting for 2 years through the courts she got her kids back.

But when the bus driver asked where my daughter was, I knew that she only told me this because she had a suspicion.

Thank goodness she doesn't drive this route anymore, everytime I pull the yellow cord to signify that this is my stop she keeps on driving. I must exit the bus when someone else is getting off.

After all that, she expects me to do the same and fight through the courts.

Whatever happened between the two Santana and El-Sayad these kids will suffer.

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