Mother Battles Tribe in Custody Row

Ten weeks ago, Grace O’Campo gave her daughter a kiss and a squeeze and sent the girl off for a five-day visit with her paternal grandparents, Navajo Indians who live on the reservation that surrounds this sleepy Colorado River town.

The shy first-grader hasn’t been home since.

When O’Campo telephoned near the end of daughter Earlene’s stay, she learned that the 6-year-old had been taken in by her Navajo father, Larry Lee, whom O’Campo left in 1984.

This is crazy, the shaken mother protested from her home in Salinas, Calif. Why are you doing this? Send my daughter back.

The reply from Parker: Earlene will not be returning. She belongs here, on the reservation.

In the weeks since, O’Campo, 32, has waged a frantic fight to get her daughter back. She has called the local police. She has approached the FBI. She has even begged Arizona’s governor for help.

But Lee, 29, was one step ahead of her. He had hired a lawyer and won temporary custody of the girl from the local tribal court. Lee, who is not talking publicly about the case, also has petitioned for permanent custody, charging in court papers that O’Campo is unfit to raise the child.

In what seemed a dizzying instant, Earlene’s fate had become a matter to be decided on the reservation. It was too late, authorities told her mother, for outsiders to interfere.

O’Campo grew desperate and, the day before Thanksgiving, resolved to abduct her child and head back to California. The pair made it to a bus stop 40 miles upriver, but their journey ended there. Tribal police caught up with them and reclaimed Earlene as her sobbing mother looked on.

Distraught and too poor to hire an attorney, O’Campo fears that the worst awaits her later this month, when a tribal judge decides which parent will take Earlene home.

She may have reason to worry, some legal experts say. The historic exodus of Indian children from their families and culture, mostly through adoptions by white couples, has made tribal courts acutely sensitive to requests by American Indian parents to keep youngsters on the reservation.

“No matter how good a mother I am, I don’t think I have a chance,” O’Campo said in an interview last week. “I sit here and think, ‘Oh, God, maybe someone will hear me, maybe someone can help me.’

“Because if I don’t get help, I’m going to lose her. I’m going to walk into that court and lose her.”

Divorced and raising a son, she was a Tupperware saleswoman marking time in Parker, her hometown. Fresh out of the Marine Corps, he was a brawny man who had a friendly way with her boy. He wooed her with roses, picnics at the river and trips to the movies. They fell in love.

It didn’t last long. Six months after giving birth to Earlene Monica on a hot August day in 1983, Grace O’Campo left Larry Lee. She moved with the children to Salinas, where a sister lived.

The parting was a hostile one, O’Campo said, and afterward Lee showed little interest in their daughter. O’Campo, who collected welfare while working part time for the Salinas Police Department and attending college, was unable to obtain child-support payments from Lee, she said.

Despite her bitterness, O’Campo’s anger did not extend to Lee’s parents, who own an upholstery shop in Parker. Mary and Leo Lee telephoned their pigtailed granddaughter almost every week, and Earlene sometimes spent holidays visiting the doting couple.

So it was with few qualms, O’Campo said, that she packed the child off for a week’s stay with the grandparents in September, when O’Campo was scheduled to undergo minor surgery.

She soon regretted her decision. When O’Campo telephoned to ask that Earlene be brought home, she was told that the girl was now living with Larry and his wife, Sandy, and their four children on the Colorado River Indian Reservation.

“I couldn’t believe this was happening, that they would try such a thing,” said O’Campo, a thin Mexican-American woman whose fluffy, light-brown hair frames her face. “I always trusted the grandparents, and I wanted her to love them, so I let them see her. I always thought they were on my side.”

In a panic, O’Campo called police, the U.S. attorney in Phoenix and the FBI, asking them to intervene, to do something. Their response provided little comfort: There was no crime of kidnaping, they told her, because she had released Earlene willingly.

Moreover, since the dispute had happened on the reservation, it was a tribal matter. Because the nation’s Indian reservations are essentially sovereign federal enclaves exempt from state laws, tribes have the authority to decide most civil matters and all but the most serious criminal cases that arise on their lands and involve American Indians.

Despite the discouraging news, O’Campo remained convinced that Lee was bluffing, that, once confronted, he would return the child. When she arrived in Parker, however, that hope abruptly faded: O’Campo was served with tribal court orders granting temporary custody to Lee and barring her from removing Earlene pending further action by a judge.

“When I saw those papers, I just cried,” O’Campo said. Later, she called Lee’s mother.

“ ‘Why are you doing this? What have I ever done to you?’ I asked her. All she would say was, ‘You’ll have your day in court.’ ”

Lee, a local mine worker, has a different story. In documents on file at the court of the Colorado River Indian Tribes, he accuses O’Campo of exhibiting “ever-changing whims” through the years as to where Earlene should live.

“Grace O’Campo is unable or unwilling to provide a stable, loving and otherwise suitable home environment for our daughter Earlene,” Lee said in an affidavit. On “numerous occasions,” he continued, “O’Campo has advised me that she either could not or would not handle our daughter Earlene and asked me to take our daughter, only to later change her mind and take our daughter Earlene back again.”

Contrary to O’Campo’s version, Lee also said she called him Sept. 24 and asked that he pick up Earlene and keep her permanently on the reservation in Parker.

O’Campo vehemently denies these assertions, saying that she has never wavered in her desire to raise Earlene. But Lee’s statements persuaded Chief Tribal Judge Neil Flores, who granted his request for temporary custody and a restraining order against O’Campo on Oct. 6.

Neither Lee nor his attorney would discuss the case with a reporter. But Earlene’s grandfather, in an interview at his upholstery shop in Parker, said he did not know why his son had launched the court fight.

“I don’t know why he’s doing it, and I don’t want to take sides,” Leo Lee said. “I don’t blame her for fighting for her baby. Even animals fight for their young. I just wish they’d get together and work this out, because I feel bad for the kid.”

Asked whether he believed that O’Campo was an unfit mother, Leo Lee said, “I’ve never seen her hit the kid, if that’s what you mean.” And his son? “He puts food on the table,” Leo Lee said, “so I suppose that makes him a good father. What do I know?”

After O’Campo and Lee split up, there were no court proceedings to determine legal custody of Earlene. O’Campo said she assumed that Lee had no interest in raising the girl and did not think that formalizing the matter was necessary.

Lawyers say that Lee thus was able to place the issue in the hands of the tribal court.

“The bottom line is he filed (for custody) first,” said Jane Gorman, an Orange County attorney familiar with tribal law. “If she had filed in state court, then jurisdiction would have been established there. But now that the tribal court has the case, it would be very, very hard to convince the state courts to take it away.”

O’Campo, however, disputes the tribal court’s jurisdiction, noting that Lee and Earlene are Navajo and not members of the Colorado River Indian Tribes.

But legal experts say that a 1987 decision by the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld tribal jurisdiction over non-member Indians living on the reservation. That could change depending on the fate of an appeal now pending before the U.S. Supreme Court.

“It sounds unfair,” said Patrick Romero Guillory, a San Francisco attorney who represented the Navajo nation in a recent case involving a disputed adoption. “But if the tribal court has declared jurisdiction, then her only remedy may be in that court.”

Guillory and others say that, regardless of the jurisdictional question, what O’Campo needs now is a good attorney. So far, however, her efforts to obtain legal help have been fruitless.

Volunteer lawyer groups in Phoenix, Yuma and Kingman either lack tribal law specialists or say they find it inconvenient to take cases in small, remote Parker. She said that a local attorney would take the case only if paid a $4,000 retainer. O’Campo’s family so far has saved up $2,000.

Frustrated and sensing that events were whirling out of her control, O’Campo made what she concedes was a desperate move last month--the attempt to spirit her daughter out of Arizona. She said conversations with several Parker officials gave her hope that Earlene would be beyond the tribal court’s reach in California.

At 1 p.m. on Nov. 22, O’Campo and an accomplice parked beside some pink oleanders in front of Blake Elementary School. Moments later, O’Campo plucked her stunned daughter from her classroom as the teacher and dozens of schoolchildren screamed.

An hour later, the fleeing pair were dropped off in Lake Havasu City, where they intended to catch a bus out of town. The plan was to reunite with relatives of O’Campo in San Bernardino for Thanksgiving dinner the next day.

But things did not work out that way. Lake Havasu City police, alerted by tribal officials that O’Campo might be in the area, spotted her at the bus stop and took her to the station. Despite O’Campo’s pleas, local detectives turned the matter over to tribal police, who soon drove off with Earlene.

“I felt sorry for the lady. She was crying and very upset,” Detective Steve Wolf said. “But the Indian police had a court order and said they had authority to take the child. I’m no expert in tribal law, but they did have a court order.”

Tribal Police Chief Stuart Harper said that in seizing Earlene, O’Campo had violated the restraining order issued by Judge Flores. Harper said he has asked the La Paz County attorney’s office to file criminal charges of “custodial interference” against O’Campo.

On Dec. 15, the tribal court will determine where Earlene will spend the next 12 years of her life. In a telephone interview, Flores said he will consider “the ability of each parent to provide proper care, previous custody arrangements” and other factors in making his decision.

“It will all depend on what is best for the child,” the judge said.

Awaiting the showdown, O’Campo sits nervously by the phone at her parents’ home in Parker, two miles from the daughter she is forbidden to see. O’Campo first told her story to a local weekly newspaper, the Gem. Sympathy has poured forth, but nothing more.

“When this first happened, I felt that once people could hear my story, they would know I am in the right,” O’Campo said. “Now I see that doesn’t matter. I know I don’t have a chance. But I won’t sit down and let them do this to me. I won’t go home without her.”