Quets had won visitation rights to the children and had been fighting to win them back for good. A divorced woman who had gone through fertility treatments for years, Quets had worried about losing out on her dream to be a mother. Using a donated egg and sperm, she became pregnant and gave birth to the twins on July 6, 2005. But a tough pregnancy and the premature birth left her weakened and depressed. When the children were just five weeks old, Quets, a single parent, signed the papers giving them up for adoption. She changed her mind almost immediately.
“I should never have had papers put in front of me,” said Quets, who says she was relying, in part, on the advice of a former boyfriend. She says he urged her to give the children to Kevin and Denise Needham, a couple who lived in North Carolina. The former boyfriend was distantly related to Kevin. “I was so sick and the postpartum depression was so bad that you can’t attribute any meaningful thought process to me.”
Quets went to court repeatedly in an effort to get the adoption nullified. As the case wound its way through the appellate system, she exercised visitation rights to see the children every three weekends, traveling to Durham, N.C., the home of the Needhams. The Needhams were sympathetic to Quets’s plight, according to Deborah Sandlin, the couple’s domestic attorney. They “would have let her have visitation whether it was enforceable or not,” Sandlin said.
But in November 2006, according to Quets, the Needhams abruptly reneged on giving her her scheduled time with the children. “I flew up to North Carolina and waited and waited at the determined spot,” says Quets. “They never showed up.” Her efforts to schedule a makeup visit were rebuffed, she said, and she began to grow desperate. “I just wanted to be a mom with my kids,” she said.
Before her next scheduled visit she obtained passports for the children. A few days before Christmas she picked up the children—she had agreed to return them on Dec. 24—and then scurried to Canada. In Ottawa she signed a six-month lease on a townhouse, apparently intending to stay for a long time. She also researched extradition proceedings. Prosecutors say the trip was scarcely some spur-of-the-moment adventure.
Acting on a tip, the Ottawa police found Quets and the twins. She waived extradition and was transferred to North Carolina in early January. She pleaded guilty in September after being advised by her lawyer that the government had a very strong case. On Tuesday, U.S. District Court Judge James Dever III in Raleigh sentenced Quets—who had pleaded guilty to international parental kidnapping in September—to time served and five years of probation. Quets had been held in the Franklin County Jail in Raleigh for eight months. The judge also imposed a $15,000 fine.
The U.S. attorney in the case, John Bowler, suggested that Quets did not appear to regret fleeing with her children. “We hoped she would show remorse and respect to the suffering of the parents,” he told the court.
Quets, a former engineer for Lockheed Martin, says she has spent more than $400,000 trying to win custody of the children. In the ruling, Judge Dever referred to Quets as “the kidnapper” and ordered her to stay away from the children. The birth mother has not seen her children, who are now about two and a half years old, since her arrest on Dec. 29, 2006.
Friends of the Needham family posted on their Web site this week a statement from the adoptive parents: “Our lives will always feel less secure now that we know Ms. Quets will do something as extreme as kidnapping Holly and Tyler … In the end, our job is to make sure that Holly and Tyler have wonderful lives—that they grow up confident in the fact that they are wanted and loved unconditionally, and that they know their story as they are old enough to understand it.”
According to court records, Quets met with the Needhams five weeks after the birth, but at the time balked at placing her children with them. She changed her mind days later, signing a consent for adoption and terminating her parental rights on Aug. 16, 2005. Quets changed her mind again almost immediately and began fighting to overturn the decree in court. (Only 17 states allow a mother a period of time in which to change her mind, ranging from three to 30 days. In the rest of the country the decision is considered final upon the mother’s signature.)
Experts on adoption say the case is extremely rare. “This is a man-bites-dog story,” said Adam Pertman, executive director of the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute, a policy and research leader in the field. “And thank God it is rare. It may give us insight into larger issues, but this case is an aberration.” Quets’s story does point up how women, especially if they are physically ill or emotionally troubled, need to be sufficiently counseled about the rights—and children—they are signing away.
Pertman says most states treat the process too cavalierly. “We need to be much more mindful of what is involved in a woman making this excruciating, lifelong decision,” he says. “It’s not like signing over the rights to your automobile. We have to do this in a humane, thoughtful manner that gives women the right to consider what they are doing—to really think through the impact and only then take that final step of terminating their rights forever.”
According to Bernard Perlmutter, a professor of family law at the University of Miami, the Quets case will not create a major precedent in family law. “She was not the legal parent, even if she enjoyed visitation. Once she signed over … whether she was of sound mind, it was still a surrender of parental rights. The sentence meted out doesn’t have any impact on family law per se. By absconding, any criminal law trumps any claim she has under family law doctrine.”
Pertman agrees: “By law it is an abduction case. We can feel how we want about the morality and the ethics of it, but if you take a child across borders without permission then it is a prima facie criminal matter. A judge and jury can take into account more ethical and moral considerations, but as a legal matter it is pretty clear what it is.”
In an interview with NEWSWEEK, Quets said she now understands that the trip to Canada with the children will likely mean she will never see them again. “Of course I regret taking the kids to Canada,” she says. “It was Christmas … I was just in a very desperate state of mind to be with my children.”
