Mom Fights to Protect Kids From Father

Eight years after her ex-husband abducted her children and took them to a country at war, and two years after she won an international legal battle to wrest them back, Shayna Gluck Lazarevich once again lives in fear.

She is afraid her ex-husband, a Serbian arms manufacturer now in federal custody in the United States, will soon be freed--perhaps as early as today. She is afraid he will return to take their 14-year-old daughter Sasha and 11-year-old son Andre back to the former Yugoslav federation.

“A lot of people have said to me, ‘Why don’t you change your name and go into hiding?’ It doesn’t seem like something we should have to do,” Shayna Lazarevich said. “That we have to hide, that I have to worry while my children go out and play.”

It is the latest chapter in a long-running family saga that began as a straightforward divorce in Los Angeles County but has, over the better part of a decade, come to involve police, high-level diplomats, attorneys and judges in three countries.

Dragisa Lazarevich, 49, was convicted in February in Los Angeles of a federal charge of passport fraud; the government charged that he falsified the children’s passport applications, enabling him to take them out of the country.

Shayna Lazarevich, a 35-year-old student at UC Santa Cruz, has launched a public campaign to make sure her ex-husband receives something more than a “slap on the wrist” at his sentencing today.

U.S. District Judge Audrey B. Collins could release Dragisa Lazarevich immediately because federal sentencing guidelines allow a sentence as brief as six months or as long as 60 months, and he has spent 20 months in custody since his 1995 arrest in the Netherlands.

Asks Shayna Lazarevich: “How do I protect my children and myself against this man who is able to get in and out of the country whenever he wants?”

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Dragisa Lazarevich’s federal public defender, David McLane, counters that his client is a victim of “outrageous governmental misconduct.” He says the U.S. ambassador assured Serbian officials that Dragisa Lazarevich would not be prosecuted if the children were returned to their American mother--a charge that State Department officials have denied.

Dragisa Lazarevich has said that he took the children because his ex-wife moved with them from Southern California to Santa Cruz.

In an April letter to Judge Collins, he wrote: “I made a mistake, and I am sorry for that. . . . I can only say it was a mistake made out of love for my children. I know I have hurt my ex-wife by doing this, and I apologize for that.”

Such statements ring hollow for his ex-wife, who spent six years trying to get the children returned, shuttling back and forth from California to Belgrade, haunting the courts and government ministries of Yugoslavia as the country descended into civil war.

This month, anticipating her ex-husband’s possible release, she obtained a Santa Cruz Superior Court restraining order against him. He is being held without bail at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Los Angeles.

She has campaigned to keep him behind bars for as long as possible, sending letters to congressional representatives, women’s groups and federal officials.

“Dragisa has made his intentions clear,” she wrote in a letter to Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) in August. “When he is released, he will pursue us--wherever we are. Again, I ask for only a few years of peace with my children--to the six years of torment he inflicted upon us.”

She said she met her husband in a Los Angeles dance club in the late 1970s, when she was 17. They crossed paths more than once in the then-burgeoning folk dancing scene. Dragisa Lazarevich, 14 years her senior, was a good dancer.

When the couple married and began to raise a family in Downey, she said she soon learned that her husband, who is from a small town in northern Serbia, held a traditional view of marriage and of his wife’s role: to stay at home with the children. (Years later, after the kidnapping, he would complain to an American reporter that his ex-wife was “so much a feminist, I see her as a half-man.”) By 1988, feeling she had outgrown the marriage and wanting to attend college, she filed for divorce.

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A Los Angeles Superior Court judge granted Dragisa Lazarevich unsupervised visitation rights for three weekends each month. In September 1989, he picked up 7-year-old Sasha and 5-year-old Andre from their mother’s apartment at UC Santa Cruz.

He never brought them back.

Her efforts to recover the children soon received international media attention, with the Bush and Clinton administrations intervening on her behalf. She hired several Serbian lawyers and even a private detective, paid for by money from her ex-husband’s U.S. bank accounts, which officials had impounded. Finally, she received an audience with the then-ambassador to Yugoslavia, Warren Zimmerman. He, in turn, began to pressure the Serbian government.

In 1991, Zimmerman wrote to the Yugoslav minister of justice, Predrag Todorovic, promising that Dragisa Lazarevich “could receive assurances that he would receive normal visitation rights in California and unrestricted entry into the United States should, as we hope, Mrs. Lazarevich be awarded final custody of the children.”

Although Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic promised the children would be returned soon, four more years passed until Serbian police finally took custody of the children and handed them over to U.S. diplomats in 1995.

Reunited with Sasha and Andre at the American embassy in Belgrade, their mother returned with them to Santa Cruz.

Their father was arrested, convicted of kidnapping by a Yugoslav court and ordered to pay a small fine. He received no jail sentence.

A few months later, he was detained by Dutch authorities as he tried to travel from the former Yugoslav federation to Oakland. There was an INTERPOL warrant for his arrest in the Santa Cruz kidnapping.

Why Lazarevich was returning to California is a matter of dispute. McLane said his client was going to seek custody of the children--or at the very least, visitation rights. Their mother believes he was planning a second kidnapping.

A Dutch court extradited Lazarevich to face U.S. charges of passport fraud--one for each child--but ruled that he would face double jeopardy if he were extradited and tried for the kidnapping again.

In California, a jury found him guilty of one count of passport fraud and acquitted him of the other. That left the sentencing--a series of hearings in which the 1989 kidnapping has assumed a central role.

Fearing that her ex-husband might receive a sentence as brief as six months for the passport fraud, Shayna Lazarevich renewed her letter-writing campaign, persuading several elected officials, including Boxer and 34 members of the House of Representatives, to write letters on her behalf.

Because she got her children back, “a lot of people think it’s over and that we’re living happily ever after, hunky-dory,” Shayna Lazarevich said. Instead, she finds herself face to face with her ex-husband in a series of court hearings.

“It’s awful,” she said. “You just sit there and wish this wasn’t happening.”

McLane said that under pressure from his former wife and her supporters, federal prosecutors have unfairly turned Dragisa Lazarevich’s sentencing into a trial on the kidnapping.

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“This is a family tragedy,” McLane said. “But in my opinion, what’s going on in this case is a legal injustice.”

The prosecutor on the case, Assistant U.S. Atty. David R. Fields, declined comment, citing the pending sentencing.

In a motion to dismiss the charges, MMcLane cited Ambassador Zimmerman’s 1991 letter, arguing that the government had broken its promise not to seek charges. Prosecutors produced a statement from a high-ranking American diplomat who denied giving the Serbian authorities any such assurances.

Collins denied the motion.

Today, the judge will attempt to balance a mother’s lingering fear and the written apology of her ex-husband.

“I know I will be deported, and I will not be able to enter the United States legally to see my children again,” he wrote. “That is the worst punishment I can receive.”