Children Caught in the Middle

In a stately San Marino home with quiet, dark-wood floors, an unplugged baseball bat lamp and two empty beds, Diana and Milan Cheyovich wait and pray for the return e two boys they wistfully call their “children.”

The couple had reared their grandchildren for more than half the boys’ lives, during their daughter Joan’s frequent escapes from a bad marriage in France. When Joan Cheyovich Joye died suddenly in 1992, the boys’ father agreed that they should stay with their maternal grandparents. A Los Angeles Superior Court affirmed the arrangement.

Then the father, Jacky Joye, decided to reclaim his children. He walked into his sons’ two schools one day in 1992 and demanded that officials there release them to his care. He spirited Nicholas, 8, and Daniel, 12, back to France while Diana and Milan Cheyovich frantically raced to Los Angeles International Airport too late to stop him.

Today the boys remain in France, the case is tied up in the French courts, and the older child, now 15, rejects all contact with his grandparents.

The Cheyovichs, a continent and an ocean away, feel betrayed not only by their former son-in-law, but also by officials of the San Marino Unified School District, whom they have sued for releasing the boys to Joye.

“The schools were our judge and jury,” Diana Cheyovich said, breaking into sobs. “People say enjoy your life--what’s life without them?”

In a telephone interview from his home in Isle-Jourdain, a small town near Toulouse, Joye contended that the boys told him after their mother’s funeral that they wanted to live with him--a conversation that the Cheyovichs said they knew nothing about.

“They have been through so many changes, I thought either they come back to France and be raised by me, or stay with their grandparents,” Joye said. “They both decided that they wanted to come back to France.”

Contending that he was unaware of the temporary custody order, Joye said he returned to France alone after the funeral to begin planning for the boys’ return. But he began worrying that the Cheyovichs might not be willing to return the boys to him.

So he decided to take matters into his own hands and hatched a plan by phone with Daniel. He decided that meeting the boys at school provided the best opportunity to take them away.

Michael Declues, the attorney for the school district, said the district did the best it could in a difficult situation.

“The father of these boys removed them from the schools in this country and took them back to France totally and completely on his own,” he said.

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The Cheyovichs’ 50-year union produced four daughters, including Joan, the second eldest, and 13 grandchildren. Other than Joan, who fell in love with a Frenchman at UC Berkeley and moved with him to France, the children all lived near their parents.

Eventually, Joan also would rejoin her family.

Her life with her husband was stormy, her mother said. There were frequent separations, when Joan took her children and returned to her parents’ home; twice, Joan divorced her husband, only to return to him in hopes of reuniting the fledgling family.

The third time she went back to France, however, Joan and Jacky did not remarry. When she left him in 1991, it was to be for good, her mother said.

“It was misery, it was agony for her,” Diana said.

Her parents helped Joan buy a house in San Marino, to which the young mother lovingly attended, spending hours at such tasks as scraping paint off the bricks around her new fireplace.

“This is the first place I’ve had that I’ll really be able to call home,” Joan told her parents.

Until the house was ready, Joan and her sons lived with the Cheyovichs, as they had many times before.

In 1992, one week before she was to move into her new home, Joan went to bed early one evening. She never woke up. Months of forensic examinations revealed only that her heart had stopped.

After their daughter’s death, the couple threw themselves into caring for their two grandchildren; with the boys already enrolled in San Marino schools, the Cheyovichs settled into a routine of homework, Little League games and tennis lessons.

On the advice of her attorney, who warned about the potential for an international kidnapping, Diana visited both boys’ schools and the San Marino Police Department, giving each a copy of the Los Angeles Superior Court order granting her temporary custody.

The schools were instructed to release the children only to Diana or Milan Cheyovich. So as not to complicate the school’s responsibility, Diana said, she barred even her other children from picking up the boys.

If their father ever showed up on school grounds without the Cheyovichs, Diana said she told school administrators, it would mean that something was awry and that they should call police.

Even as she was laying out her precautions, Diana never thought they would be necessary. The Cheyovichs felt certain that the court would grant them permanent custody, Joye would not contest the ruling, and they and Joye would work out a visitation schedule.

“There’s no way we wanted to deprive their father of seeing them and being with them,” Diana said. “We wanted to give him summers and vacations.”

On June 15, 1992--three days before a court hearing on permanent guardianship--all contingency plans failed. Neither of the boys’ schools was able to stop Joye from taking the boys.

A typed declaration signed by Daniel and filed with the court last year states that he was a willing partner in his father’s plan and met Joye that day in the Huntington Middle School parking lot to go back to France.

Daniel said he did not communicate with anyone at Huntington Middle School. Joye apparently did; a note, filed with the school and signed by Joye, said, “My son, Daniel Cheyovich-Joye, will be absent from school June 15 and 16.”

According to police reports, Joye took Daniel, then 12, to Nicholas’ school, Valentine Elementary School at 8:30 a.m. and announced that he was taking both sons back to France. The principal at the time, Mary A. Meye, gave him a copy of the court order and said the boys’ guardians told her not to release the children.

“I have read this and I don’t care,” the police report quoted the father as saying. “I’m their father, and I’m taking them with me to France.”

Joye threw the court order down, wrote a note detailing his intentions to take his younger son out of the school and removed him from his classroom, the police report said.

In an interview, Joye said he did not know that the Cheyovichs had temporary guardianship and therefore believed that he was legally entitled to take his children back to France before the permanent guardianship hearing could occur.

Meye would not comment about the case.

“Why didn’t they stop him?” Diana Cheyovich asked. “Or call the police to stop him? They knew he was not supposed to be there.”

Responded school district attorney Declues: “We were not negligent. The teachers and administrators involved acted in a reasonable fashion and contacted the appropriate authorities within a reasonable period of time.”

The Cheyovichs question whether Daniel should have been allowed to make the original decision about where to live with no input from the court or his court-appointed guardians. The grandparents also wonder if the father is turning the boys against them.

In their declarations, signed three years after they left San Marino, Daniel and Nicolas each stated that they did not want to live with the Cheyovichs.

Joye said Daniel no longer wishes to speak to them. Nicolas, he said, misses them very much.

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Since the day the boys left, the Cheyovichs have seen them twice. Once, during a three-hour court-ordered visit in France, the couple visited only with “Niko”; the elder boy, Joye said, did not want to see them.

On a second trip to France for a deposition, the Cheyovichs were allowed to visit Niko only.

For now, they are awaiting a new trial in France. Although they won a first trial, in which a French court found that Joye violated the Hague Convention by illegally removing the children, they lost Joye’s appeal.

A French Supreme Court ruling--which concurred with the first decision that found Joye guilty of kidnapping--remanded the case back to the lower court for consideration of which home, at this point, would be in the children’s best interest.

The couple waits and worries. The court could conceivably decide against disrupting the boys’ lives by moving them--which, to Diana, would be rewarding their father for illegally taking his sons.

Or, what Diana fears almost as much, the court could send back to the United States two boys whose happy memories of their grandparents have faded or vanished.

“I don’t know where the justice is anymore,” Diana said.