Twenty Years a Kidnapping: Happiness and Horsies and Home-Grown Extremism

By Sean Aaron Cruz

American home-grown religious extremism isn’t always about Muslims and jihad, and the violence the extremists inflict on their victims does not always involve bombs, bullets or bloody knives.

What they do have in common is a slavish belief that they are answering to a call higher than what either civil or moral authority allows, utterly beyond mortal law.

They share this core conviction that they are doing what The Man Upstairs (aka God, Allah, Joseph Smith, and by other names) wants them to do.

And there is nothing quite so satisfying as getting over on someone who has insulted one’s Big Religious Deal and whom one doesn’t like personally.

My baby girl Allie (Alexis) Cruz made these five drawings one day in August 1995, when she was 7 years old and just 6 months before she disappeared into Utah in a Mormon shunning/kidnapping along with my other children: Natalia, Tyler and Aaron.

I found them just this morning in a box that I haven't opened in a long, long time. 

 My mom and I would often watch Allie draw and color and create actual stories while we talked at the kitchen table in my three-generational household. All we had to do was supply the paper and assorted supplies, and Allie would sing and tell us her stories while she worked, often for hours at a stretch.

Each of these images corresponds to the story she wound out for my mom and I, inventing characters and conversations, talking and singing all the while she colored and drew, and she made these five pictures in a single sitting.

Allie especially loved to draw horsies, and her scenes and stories were always clever and lively, full of sunshine and happiness, and more horsies….

Our home was our castle, and it was a place where she and her horsies were safe, while the dramas surrounding her mother’s marriages and divorces took place….

Allie began exhibiting this talent, this creative impulse that had to be expressed, when she was four, and I have those drawings also, to be published on another day, but this is her book of five pictures, made on our kitchen table that day in August, just about twenty years ago. 

While my mom and I were watching Allie make these very drawings, Mormons in three states were planning the abduction, intent on separating my children from me.

I had told them, these members of the Battle Ground and La Center, Washington LDS wards, years before, that I wanted their church influence out of my family, and that I did not like what they were teaching my children.

But my ex wanted to put these Mormons in charge of educating our children, and they were determined to take them and keep them forever, hidden in Utah.

These Mormons felt that I had insulted their big white church (they all carry that persecution complex), and maybe I had, you be the judge.

I had told them that they were like the Borg, if the Borg were all white and ignorant; that the Book of Mormon was full of nonsense; that their baptism for the dead rituals was just so much busy work; that there never were any golden plates, and I’m pretty sure that we disagreed over some other fine points of doctrine and plain common sense, especially that Kory Wright character in Vancouver, who was the architect of the kidnapping, using his leadership position in all three states.

He’s a Big Deal in the Mormon Church, an executive with a Mormon debt collection company, Columbia Ultimate, based in Vancouver, Washington, with lots of Big Church Embarrassment potential.

So there was Kory and Chris Wright, the principle Mormon jihadists, and in Battle Ground there was also Connie and Barry Dunford and the Mormon bishop Donald Taylor. The group of Mormons organizing the kidnapping/shunning came to include church leaders in Hillsboro, Oregon, also, but I would not learn that until after the fact.

Later, I learned that Mormon Relief Society President Evelyn Taylor and Bishop David Holiday organized the "taking, keeping, and enticing" my children from Hillsboro, Oregon, a Class B felony good for up to five years in prison.

So they made their own plans for my children, while Allie made these drawings for my mom and I, and my other kids played out in the yard. I was my mom’s sole caregiver at the time. She had been medically fragile for many years.

Once my children were sequestered in Utah, being moved from place to place, Mormon households and motel rooms, the drawing ended, as did every other part of normal life for all of us, my children, my mom and myself. Allie’s creative spark was snuffed out, Aaron fell into suicidal despondency.

The Mormon Wall went up, my kids hidden behind deserts and mountains, the Wall protecting all of those involved in the abduction from public scrutiny and legal consequences.

The Mormons had and have their victory, permanently severing my family.

My mom died four years later without seeing or hearing from her grandchildren again, and my son Aaron is dead, all in their service to the LDS White Man in Charge.  God‘s favorite hangout and Number One Confidant lives in Salt Lake City, you see.

A cheap price to pay, in the eyes of a religious extremist.

No blood, bullets or bombs…it’s as if nothing happened at all….

Nothing at all….

Nothing happened at all….

Now, twenty years later, I can photograph the life we had together, expressed in  Allie’s drawings and stories in high-definition color and post them on the web, and there is nothing the Mormons who kidnapped my children can do about it.

I will be my children’s father forever, and I want to make that clear to everyone who had a piece of this action.

You are in it forever too.

And I am coming for you....