Emergency Legal Steps to Retrieve an Abducted Child
What do you do when the parent of your child has fled the state with them without your knowledge or consent? My name is Carl Birkhead, I am with Wirth Law Firm, and I’m here to help you make law easy when the co-parent of your child has absconded with the child. I had this come up recently, where the child was placed primarily with parent A. There’s a lot of DHS involvement. DHS would remove the child, bring the child back, remove the child, bring the child back, and ultimately, the parent decided that she was just going to absolutely bolt, leave the state, take the child with her. My client had nothing that he could do, really.
Luckily, we had enough information in this case, where we were able to help him out. This is a situation where it was a bit of an emergency because we believed, based on past behavior and past mental health issues, that this parent was behaving very erratically, so we had an emergency, and we were able to seek immediate help from the court. What we do, we had our client come in, got the information from him, got everything that he knew personally, and can personally testify about as far as what happened and why we believed that his child was in danger.
Seeking Legal Assistance
Required a couple of extra steps other than just getting an emergency custody order, though, because the child was out of state. We had to get rid of habeas corpus, which is a Latin term that means produce the body. With that, we needed a writ of assistance also so that my client could avail himself of help from local law enforcement in that state. Sometimes it’s tricky to get a local PD to be willing to help out or not, but luckily in this case, he was fortunate enough to connect with the Sheriff’s Department, which was willing to assist on this matter and actually enforce the order that we had obtained for him.
The process in total took about three days of legal legwork, and long story short, that child has been safely returned to our client’s care. Situations like this can be very tricky, and obviously, they can be very worrying for a parent in this situation. If you find yourself in a situation where your child has been taken from the state without your knowledge or consent, or if you are afraid that that might happen, please feel free to reach out to us. My name is Carl Birkhead with Wirth Law Firm, and I’m here to help you make law easy.
Contact Us for a Low-Cost Initial Strategy Session
If you are facing a situation where your child has been taken out of state without your consent, don’t hesitate to reach out for help. Call us at 918-879-1681 to schedule a low-cost initial strategy session with our experienced legal team. We are here to help you navigate through this challenging time and work towards a resolution that is in the best interest of you and your child.
