This archive report was first published on 6 December 2019.
December 6, 2019, marked a difficult day for Claude Dary, an American father fighting to be reunited with his two-year-old son, Rowan, who was taken to Nairobi by his estranged Kenyan girlfriend.
According to court documents, Dary and his ex-girlfriend split in 2018, and he has been battling to get back his son ever since.
He claims that when they broke up, his ex-girlfriend suddenly stopped answering his calls, and within a week, mother and child had relocated to Kenya.
Family court documents show that in May, a Manhattan Family Court judge ruled that the mother should return the child to Manhattan, but the decision was stayed after her attorney appealed.
Despite repeated attempts to contact the child's mother, she has remained unresponsive, leaving Dary heartbroken.
“Without my knowledge or consent, she just upped and left and won’t bring him back. I thought laws would prevent something like that from happening,” Dary said.
A hearing is now scheduled for late January, and Dary remains hopeful that he will soon be reunited with his son.
