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....

Thoughts on an abducted daughter's birthday....

February 2nd is my baby girl Allie's birthday. She disappeared into Utah along with her sister and two brothers ten days after her 8th birthday, 19 years ago, in an abduction/shunning organized and carried out by Mormons in three states. 

She is living somewhere in the LDS empire, still in the grip of the congregations that took her so long ago. 

She drew the "You will shine for ME! Every day!" for me and my mom a few months before she vanished. Her drawing kept me alive more times than I can count over the years. When hope of seeing her and her siblings ever again faded, I promised her drawing that I would shine for her, every day, never giving up. 

Now, within the next few weeks, the Oregon legislature will take up the issue of child abduction again, and I will see that these images are entered into the public record. For you, baby girl, wherever you are, know that your daddy never stopped loving you....

Deeper than the core of the Earth

Deeper than the core of the Earth

By Sean Aaron Cruz

The abduction of my four children

Blew a hole in me

More than 18 years wide

Deeper than the core

Of the Earth

Pain measured in light years

Blew holes in my children also

Innocent victims

Aaron died from the shock

From “Undetermined Causes”

In MormonLand Utah

All this because I disagreed

With some Mormons

Long ago….

On Trust and Conditional Love

By Sean Aaron Cruz

March 21, 2014 (Aaron’s birthday)

This photo of my late son Aaron has always had a special hold on me. Every time I look at it, ever since I took this photo, the word “trust” comes to my mind, and I think about how this beautiful boy had every reason in the world to trust those around him, family and friends, and the people his parents allowed into his life. He is looking at me. I am looking at him. He is looking back at me. We are One Together.

Aaron had every reason to believe that his future and those of his brother and two sisters were secure; secure in the sense that love in our family was unconditional and permanent (“I love you to infinity”, we often said to each other). He knew he was loved, that he was a priority in his parents’ lives, as were each of his siblings, and in this love was the foundation of his confidence, the trust so clear in his eyes. He is looking at me. I am looking at him. He is looking back at me. We are One Together.

There came a time, however, when his parent’s priorities changed, after his mother became involved in Mormonism, like falling into a deep chasm full of crazy-ass ideas, which led to the breakup of his family, and now there were a different sort of people allowed into his life, True Believers with smiling faces and religious agendas, home-baked cookies and Books of Mormon, people with status and impressive church titles in his mother’s new world, and the foundation he had grown up on had changed, had vanished utterly; love was now conditional….

 I never got on with his mother’s new Mormon friends, not while we were still married, and never after. They looked at me and the word “Mexican” would explode in their brains, along with all their stereotypical imagery. You could see it in their eyes, their demeanor, their assumptions. I had seen that look many times before, growing up in California, where one’s Mexican-ness was always an issue one way or another, and these Mormons didn’t like race-mixing much either, so the term “half-breed” was knocking around in their heads also when they looked at me. There was that part of it.

The Mormons now intruding into our family saw me as a threat to the whiteness with which they were now enveloping my children, and in my personal religious views (more agnostic than anything else) they saw a cause for direct action. They were fighting a religious war personally directed by God Himself (to Whom they had Exclusive Direct Access right there in Salt Lake City) against people who don’t see things the same way. Seriously crazy, bug-eyed religious fervor, a group of people bent enough to plot the disappearance of four children on a school day and to conceal them in the mountains east of Ogden, Utah. Mormons with titles: Bishop, Counselor, Relief Society President were now speaking directly to my children, from their positions of “trust”, reeking with conditional love….

First came a press of Mormon “counselors” who put a lot of hours into trying to convince me to get with their program, and after that campaign failed, after I rejected their last arguments, the same group of ideologues convinced my children’s mother to file for divorce, provided a top Mormon lawyer, and a 15-year marriage came to an end in a matter of weeks, our family itself now conditional….

My ex’s Mormon friends decided to separate my children from me as a punishment, a consequence of my “apostasy”, although I had never believed the LDS dogma, had agreed to join their church only because I had made a deal with my wife, made after years of fruitlessly attempting to persuade her to stop smoking while she equally without success pressured me to join up (“You quit smoking, I’ll join your church,” I had finally said). This was/is by far the worst deal I ever made in my life, this one here, and if only I had simply gone back on my word, things would have turned out differently. The point is, leaving the LDS church can have negative consequences….

Aaron and his siblings vanished from Oregon on February 12, 1996, now isolated in remote Mormon enclaves, breaking our physical connections, and the Mormons now in control of their lives worked hard to destroy every emotional connection my children and I had shared. It was a deliberate, structured campaign that included introducing Aaron to Prozac, Ritalin, Zoloft, a long list of other such drugs, and Oxycontin, the gateway to the Mormon-infused opiate addiction that wrecked his chances of success in high school and gave these Mormons an excuse to blame him for his troubles, for not fitting in.

Within a year of arriving in his Utah concealment, Aaron’s despair was so intense that he began cutting himself with a knife. Years later, I saw the scars as he lay there on his Utah deathbed, long, overlapping, crisscrossing scars on both his upper arms. I had no idea a knife’s sharp edge could make a scar so wide, these marks of conditional love laid out on my beautiful son, scars on top of scars, each a remnant of the Big Bang in his shrunken universe, where Trust had become a distant, red-shifted blur, falling away hopelessly into amorphous gas and dust….

Aaron’s siblings succumbed to the pressure, joined up with his mother’s church, became fully immersed in Mormonism, made friends of their own, fell in and out of love with other Mormons, and this is where they remain today, surrounded by Mormons infused with all of the conditional love the Mormon Universe has to offer, love that would be withdrawn in a heartbeat should they ever reach out to me.

I have boxes of photographs of my children, of Aaron, of Natalia, of Tyler, of Allie, with that same look of Trust and Unconditional Love in their eyes. They are looking at me. I am looking at them. They are looking back at me, and we are One Together.

There is nothing the Mormons can do to change that.

--Portland, Oregon, March 21, 2014

A message in a bottle

Today is my baby girl’s birthday, and life beckons anew

A message in a bottle

Allie, my baby girl, was just a few days past her 8th birthday when the Mormons made her disappear, fifteen long years ago. She has lived in a succession of Mormon enclaves ever since, surrounded by Mormon ideologues, some with criminal culpability in the abduction of my children. They have focused their energies on severing every connection she might have to her birth family, on keeping her within the confines of the Mormon church, in part because that’s the way they do things in the Mormon world, but also to hide their crimes, especially from her.

The statutes of limitations have run on their crimes long ago, but not their consequences.

Any abduction of a child has lifelong consequences; no one is ever the same again. Some victims die as a result, like my son Aaron, who never had a chance at happiness again, after vanishing with his siblings into concealment in a succession of remote locations in Utah on February 12, 1996.

We live in a world where some parents can suffer the loss of a child and barely notice, a world where far too many children have been left behind by the very two people who gave them life, where far too many young people know this is what they can expect from their mom and/or their dad.

It is a world where some parents will sacrifice their children for a fix, for a snort, for two dollars, to chase after a man or a woman, or to satisfy some religious craving or mandate, or for reasons that defy understanding on any level at all.

Some religious organizations—like the Mormons—are very effective at carving families into pieces, dividing them into Mormon and non-Mormon factions, and the church has institutionalized a culture of separation, even to the point of forbidding a non-Mormon parent from attending his or her own child’s wedding, if the family is unfortunate enough to have that circumstance arise.

I had the terrible bad luck to have a wife that well into our marriage woke up one day and decided she was going to commit her life to Mormonism, though she didn’t say that at the time, and there was no way to see this coming at all. Not a hint before the fact.

But I digress….

It took me fifteen years, from the day of my children’s disappearance, to get beyond mere survival, to arrive at a point where I can celebrate life once again.

That is what I am going to do today, I am going to celebrate life. I am going to live and be happy to be alive today, February 2, 2011.

And every day thereafter….

So I am putting this message into a bottle and sending it out on its way, and maybe someday it will arrive where you can find it, baby girl, and know that your daddy never stopped loving you…never ever stopped loving you…never stopped loving you…never…ever…to infinity…love you forever, Dad….

Here she is early in life. Photographs of her or my other children after February 12, 1996 are very rare.

To you, baby girl, on your birthday.

Love, Dad

In the Garden of Intergenerational Love (for W)

By Sean Cruz

Portland, Oregon—

My grandparents lived at the edge of town, in a wood frame house in the Sacramento valley that they had surrounded with flower and vegetable gardens, trellises, grape vines and cactuses that thrived in the California sun, a chicken coop in the back, where the rooster roamed.

They had planted fruit trees, apricot, peach, plum, walnut, almond, fig and olive, long before I was born and they all easily bore my weight and that of my brother, our cousins and friends, significant chunks of childhood spent up in those trees or throwing figs at each other, racing around the house and barn or into the fields across the street. I never acquired a taste for figs, but they made superb missiles, much better than the other fruits and vegetables near at hand, and the seasonal fig fights began as soon as they were large enough to throw, still green on the tree.

My grandparents grew corn, grapes, tomatoes, peppers and chilies, cucumbers, squash, beans and peas, all destined for the kitchen table, where my grandmother made fresh tortillas every morning, where a pot of beans was always steaming on the stove, never so warm as the love she gave us children, memories of my grandmother and her red and white checked tablecloth….

My father also kept a vegetable garden in our backyard, where he spent many an hour working his stress into the earth, a facet I did not understand until later, after he was gone, and I had become an adult working in my own garden, the soil absorbing my own stress, clearing my mind, building a life for my own young family, tomato plant by tomato plant.

My father suffered a series of heart attacks, two of them while working in his garden amid the corn stalks and jalapenos. There were tears in his eyes when he told me that he would no longer be able to work out there, his heart going bad in those days before bypass surgery was available, the technology that would have saved his life not quite invented yet, and he was gone in 1975 at a youthful 52 years of age, far too soon.

My grandmother passed in 1980 at the age of 80, at least 50 of those years spent in that house, in that kitchen, in the gardens. After the house was sold, the new owners allowed the property to sink into neglect, and within a couple of years the entire garden was dead, most of the trees cut down, a tragedy, an affront, a paradise lost.

When I work in my own garden, I think of my father and my grandmother mostly. I think about the life they built for me, the foundations they laid, the garden paths they designed. I understand how valuable gardening time was to my father, and I know that I honor him when I work out there. I speak to my father in my garden.

In the eight years that I have lived here in this house, I have put hundreds of plants into the ground, all with thoughts of my parents, my grandparents and my children, all with reflections on the past, the present, the future. Plants, you see, are often not just plants….

I put fruit trees into the earth, cherry, peach and apricot, in part to connect me to those California gardens I grew up in, but the climate in Portland does not favor these varieties, and after having only one good crop, I’ve taken out the peach and apricot. I'll replace the cherries this spring.

I planted an olive tree a few years ago. It’s about eight feet tall now, and I’m going to learn how to cure the olives pretty soon.

I have a remnant of my grandmother's garden, an old concrete birdbath on a pedestal, a frog figure on top, that part broken decades ago, standing in an honored place under my olive tree, shaded, protected, priceless....

I’ve planted strawberries, blueberries, cactus, bamboo, sage, all the common garden vegetables, potatoes to tomatoes, and built a greenhouse from recycled glass doors and windows and assorted found objects, painted up in many bright colors, a couple of murals on the fence.

I like to think that after I am gone, the garden will endure, will live on, that someone will work it, knowing the linkage and the history, that the connection between this garden and my father’s garden and my grandmother’s garden will be unbroken, a legacy of fruit and vegetables and the earth to be sure, but most importantly a legacy of love, of intergenerational love, born in a grandmother’s heart, and shared on a red and white checkered tablecloth.

Before my four children disappeared in 1996 in a Mormon kidnapping, I used to work my garden with my children, like my father before me.

My grandparents names were Victor and Dominga Cruz; my parents names were John and Olive Cruz; my children’s names Natalia, Aaron, Tyler, Allie…. Honor to you, love always….

I tend a garden of intergenerational love. Sometimes it tastes like cucumbers, sometimes like snow peas, today it tastes like unfrozen strawberries, Oregon strawberries from the east side of the house….

It always tastes of love….