By Sean Aaron Cruz
“Please tell Sean that I also wish him
the best. I have also followed his career and believe his personal experience
has given him the wisdom and the moral authority necessary to make a real difference in making Oregon
safer for our children.” –Judge Jim Fun, Washington
County January 24, 2007
I received this message from Judge Fun’s judicial assistant.
He was writing in regard to the work I had done on the issue of child abduction
since my four children disappeared into Utah
in a Mormon kidnapping in 1996. Each year, more than 200,000 U.S.
children are abducted by their own parents, family members or persons known to
the family, as in church-sponsored abductions.
Judge Fun knew the issue and my family’s case very well. In
1997, he had been the Assistant District Attorney who prosecuted the 1st
degree Custodial Interference case against my former wife, which came to trial
nearly a year and a half after my kids had disappeared, and who were still being
held incommunicado in Utah at the
time of trial. He had noticed during jury selection that the defense referred
to a Washington County LDS church roster, and that there were a number of
Mormons on the jury. You know how that turned out.
But Judge Fun was writing about what I had done since then,
after the failures of both the criminal and family law systems in the wake of
the abduction of my children, with that experience and with that moral
authority:
The first and most important thing I accomplished was to
stay alive, to survive.
I’m a writer, an essayist and a blogger, so I wrote and I
blogged, posting a couple of hundred essays over the years. I had alerted and
informed Senator Avel Gordly about the issue long before she hired me to serve
as her legislative staff in 2003. That year, I testified before the Senate
Judiciary Committee and the Joint Ways
and Means Public Safety Subcommittee, and Senate President Peter Courtney
appointed the Senate President’s Interim Task Force on Parental and Family
Abduction to examine the issue and report its findings to the 2005 legislature.
I testified before the Task Force in 2004, describing how
both the family law and criminal law systems and an order for joint custody had
failed to protect my children and my family. The fact is these systems fail in
non-stranger abduction cases far more often than they succeed, which explains
the high numbers.
The Task Force found that the experience of abduction by any
person is harmful to the child, and as abusive as any other form of child
abuse. The consequences of this abuse are life long.
In 2005, Senator Gordly assigned me to lead the workgroup on
her landmark Senate Bill 1041. In that legislative session, I testified before
the Senate Judiciary Committee, the Senate Rules Committee and before the House
State
The bill went through ten major rewrites on its way to
passage on a dramatic, unanimous House vote on the last day of the 2005 legislative
session. It immediately became known as Aaron’s Law, in memory of my late son
Aaron Cruz, who had died in Payson , Utah
With Aaron’s Law (ORS 30.868), Oregon
became the first state in the nation where child abduction creates a civil
cause of action, providing kidnapping victims with new tools to see justice
served, and real deterrents to abducting a child in the first place.
Now, in 2012, Aaron’s Law is seeing its first usage in the
Kyron Horman case, first such case in the nation, a civil lawsuit for the crime
of custodial interference in the 1st degree.
I’ve written extensively about the particulars of Aaron’s
Law at www.blogoliticalsean.blogspot.com
and www.AaronsLaw.blogspot.com
Earlier this year, I took my son Aaron’s name as my own
middle name.
So, all this to say that many of my readers who know me
through my work on issues other than child abduction and who are unfamiliar
with the story of the abduction of my children may think that I might be unfair
or exaggerating where I refer to Mormons and Mormonism, but I want you all to
know that I am speaking from experience and with moral authority.
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