CAMARILLO : Mother on Probation in Abduction Case

A mother who admitted abducting her two Camarillo children last summer and fleeing to Missouri was sentenced to three years probation Tuesday on the condition that she keep away from the youngsters until a court grants her visits.

Sherry Kay Moats, 35, pleaded guilty to felony child abduction after her husband, who had legal custody of the couple’s two young children--Jessica, 9, and James, 6--tracked her to a mobile home in Missouri.

Moats spent 103 days in Ventura County Jail after being arrested in December, Deputy Dist. Atty. Pam Grossman said.

“If there is any slight deviation from the terms of her probation, she’s going to prison,” Grossman said.

James Moats, the defendant’s estranged husband, told officials that his wife abducted the children last August after she failed to return them from a weekend visit.

He tracked them down himself by visiting dozens of towns in Texas and Missouri, where he suspected she had fled, and distributing hundreds of flyers, according to his mother and brother, who attended the sentencing Tuesday.

They were found living in a squalid trailer without electricity in the backwoods of Ozark County, relatives said.

“People kept saying they’d seen the mother, but they hadn’t seen the kids,” said Signe Moats, the children’s grandmother. Both of the children are back in school and doing well, she said.

Sherry Moats could have received three years in state prison for the offense. Noel Moats, uncle to the two youngsters, said he thought his sister-in-law should have been sent to prison.