Texas police tricked into helping man kidnap his son

CHICAGO, Dec 18, 2009 - Texas police were tricked into helping a man kidnap his son in a bitter custody dispute after he used documents from Mexico to falsely claim he was the legal guardian of the 10-year-old boy, US authorities said.

“The hardest part is not being with him at night,” the boy’s mother, Berenice Diaz, told ABC News Friday.

“Not listening to him, it is not being with him, that is the hardest part.” Diaz says it was the second time her ex-husband, who has French and Mexican citizenship, has kidnapped her son.

Prosecutors issued an arrest warrant for Jean Philippe Lacombe on Monday, nearly two months after Texas police pulled the boy from his school bus and handed him to his father.

The charges were laid after the story was picked up by local media.

A heart-wrenching school bus surveillance video shows how the boy begged police not to make him go with his father.

“Somebody please help me. He’s not my dad. I don’t want to live with him,” Jean Paul Lacombe cried as he backed away from the officers.

“I want to stay with my mom. Please. Please.”

A news crew later captured images of the boy lying down in a parking lot as officers tried to reason with him and then hugging his mother and younger brother goodbye.

Lacombe, 41, was charged with kidnapping, perjury and interference with child custody.

“The district attorney’s office alleges in the affidavit that the mother, Berenice Diaz, has lawful custody of the child, Jean Paul, and that Lacombe allegedly perpetrated a fraud upon the court by misrepresenting Mexican decrees in order to unlawfully obtain possession of the child and to abscond,” the Bexar County district attorney’s office said in a statement.Lacombe was originally given custody of the boy as the couple’s seven-year marriage began to dissolve in Mexico City in 2005, the San Antonio Express News reported.

But custody was granted to Diaz after Lacombe failed to abide by the visitation rules.Diaz told the paper she spent two years getting her son back after Lacombe took the boy to France in 2005. She moved to the United States to find peace and safety.

“I thought in the United States, nothing like this would happen to me,” she told the paper.

- AFP