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Girl, mother back in Florida
By SAUNDRA AMRHEIN © St. Petersburg Times, published May 18, 2001 Leaving behind the only family she has ever known, a 7-year-old girl returned to her birthplace in Hernando County late Thursday night after the North Carolina Supreme Court refused to jump into a messy battle over her custody. With its decision Thursday morning, the high court left in place a lower court order from three weeks ago that granted permission to birth parents Lazalia "Sissy" Urick and Ernest Barnett of Brooksville to bring their daughter, Crystal, to Florida. They arrived at 11 p.m. at a family friend's home in Ridge Manor in eastern Hernando County. In mid-April, Crystal was removed from a six-bedroom house in a working-class town east of Raleigh, N.C., and placed in a foster home after the arrest of the woman she thought was her mother, Katherine Gaytan. Gaytan, 39, was charged with child abduction -- later changed to felony child restraint -- after authorities caught up with her, seven years after Urick asked Gaytan's brother to temporarily watch over Crystal as an infant. Authorities say Urick had asked to have Crystal returned, but Gaytan fled with the child to Mexico. Gaytan said she moved to her husband's homeland so Crystal could receive affordable health care. Gaytan made a last-ditch attempt Thursday afternoon to keep Crystal by filing a civil lawsuit in Raleigh seeking formal custody of the child. "(Urick) probably got that child and ran like an old dog," Gaytan said by phone Thursday from her job at a Burger King in Raleigh. "But it's not over yet." At times tearful, at times angry, Gaytan pleaded with Urick, 24, and Barnett, 29, to let Crystal say goodbye to her. Gaytan and her attorneys said a child psychologist brought in by social service workers agreed that Crystal needed closure with Gaytan. "If they love that baby, they need to do what the child psychologist wants to do," Gaytan said. "If (Barnett) wants (the goodbye) in Florida, I don't have any problem. If he wants it in a Waffle House, in a courthouse, his house, I don't care. You tell him 'cause I love her, and I'll be wherever she needs me to be. They act like they love her so much. They need to do what's right." Even as she spoke, Crystal was hundreds of miles away, traveling south on Interstate 95 in a 1998 Ford Explorer with Urick, a family friend, a half brother and a half sister. Urick had obtained custody of Crystal within hours of the morning court ruling. "We want to get them out of North Carolina as quick as possible," a relieved Barnett said from his home south of Brooksville, where he spent the day running errands and setting up purple and pink quilts for Crystal on her bed in their three-bedroom mobile home. The Supreme Court decision came just in time for Urick. Out of money, she was set Thursday to move out of the apartment in North Carolina where she had been staying the past three weeks, after the Supreme Court had temporarily blocked a district judge's decision to return Crystal to Urick and Barnett. Barnett came back to Brooksville alone at that time to resume his job as a truck driver for a demolition company and to start parenting classes. But the effort to support two households was taking its toll. Barnett's and Urick's backgrounds were the reason for the appeal to the Supreme Court. It was filed by Lewis Pitts, director of Advocates for Children's Services, an arm of Legal Services of North Carolina Inc. Pitts raised Barnett's past criminal offenses of bad-check writing and Urick's lack of custody of two of her other children and the accidental drowning of a third as reasons to support a fitness hearing. But the Supreme Court denied his request, calling his petition improper because it did not show that Crystal was facing a "restraint of liberty." Pitts did not return phone calls, but fired off a written statement to a reporter by fax. "What kind of judiciary did we elect that treats little children with such indifference and disrespect?" he asked. "Who is for kids and who is just kidding?" Gaytan's attorney, Terry Milner of Chapel Hill, N.C., said he filed a civil suit Thursday seeking formal custody of Crystal. The basis of the claim for his client, whose criminal case is pending, is that Gaytan raised Crystal with great care, while the birth parents have a spotted past, he said. But Robert Lane, Barnett's attorney, said all issues about the birth parents' pasts were considered by the district court, which found that Urick made an effort to get her child back while Gaytan evaded her. "The fights can go on legally for a while," Lane said, "but at least the child can have her life with her proper family in Florida while the battles go on."
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From the Times wire desk
From the AP |
