Fugitive mom ‘knew she was right’

Associated Press

YAKIMA — If Nancy Searing had it to do all over again, she would have taken her young son and gone underground sooner.

"I always knew I had done the right thing. There was never a question in my mind," she said Friday, one day after a Yakima County Superior Court jury acquitted her of a felony charge of custodial interference.

On the run for more than 14 years, mother and son often relied on the kindness of strangers, who offered help without asking too many questions.

"Along the way, I have met a lot of compassionate people," she said.

Even now, she is secretive out of habit and reluctant to provide a lot of details about how they made their way around the globe.

Their basic needs were always met, but the fear that she might one day lose Jason never went away, even when they finally settled in Australia.

In November 1986, Nancy and Jason, then 4, fled their Eugene, Ore., home because she believed the boy was being molested by his father.

Scott Searing, 43, of Richland, denies abusing Jason, and no charges were ever filed against him.

Nancy Searing had reported Jason’s complaints of abuse to authorities, but during her divorce trial in Yakima County in 1986, a judge ordered her to quit talking about it and threatened to give custody of the boy to his father.

"I am outraged that the system as it is and was did not keep my child safe," she said.

Nancy and Jason first went to a women’s shelter in Eugene and then another in Hawaii, where they stayed for several months before moving to Australia. She won’t talk about how she got there.

While in Australia, she learned that her biological father in Cuba was dying and wanted to see her. Searing had been adopted by Americans when she was about 6 or 7, and grew up in Roseburg, Ore.

In 1989, she and Jason moved to Cuba, where they lived with her extended family for a couple of years. By the time she arrived, though, her father had died.

She taught English in their Havana neighborhood, helped a professor compile a Cuban-English dictionary and listened to Sally Jessy Raphael on the radio late at night.

The Cuban government asked her to help scramble U.S. broadcast transmissions into the country. She told them she didn’t know how.

When the Cuban economy began to collapse, Searing decided they should move again, but the process took months of phone calls and paperwork. And she needed passports.

She said U.S. officials, fully aware of her situation, processed the documents and gave her the passports — hers issued in her maiden name and her son’s with his full legal name.

In 1991, mother and son flew to Miami. She didn’t know if someone would be there to arrest her or seize Jason.

"I actually thought it might be the last time I saw my son," she said.

But there was no one there, and they went to stay with her sister in a small town in Georgia. After a few months, they returned to Hawaii, where Jason’s therapist told her the boy — just about to enter fourth grade — needed more time to recover. So they returned to Australia and stayed until January of this year.

They gave up everything, she said, so Jason could grow up safe. By his own account, in court on Thursday, he did.

Jason, who will be 19 on Oct. 30, is preparing to take college entrance exams and dreams of being a major league baseball player. He graduated from high school in Australia, where he had friends, worked at the school’s radio station and played a lot of team sports, including cricket.

The 12 jurors who heard the case were impressed.

"He seemed like a good kid — a sharp kid," said one 43-year-old juror from Yakima, who did not want his name published. "From what it appeared, he was being brought up in a good home."

Now free from the fear of prison time — custodial interference carries a maximum sentence of five years and a $10,000 fine — Searing and her son will work to rebuild their lives in the United States.

She needs to find a job and is writing her story. It might someday be a book. She and Jason are working on a Web site, too, for women who go underground.

"I’m looking for work, and the most recent polished skills I have (are) that of being an expert fugitive and a believing mother," Searing said.

"The system as it was gave me no other choice. The system insulted myself and my child. I think it, at the very least, owes my son an apology."

Associated Press