It is definitely not the ending anybody anticipated, however fortunately it is a glad one—after six years of looking, an Illinois father has been reunited together with his daughter, 15-year-old Kayla Unbehaun, following her 2017 disappearance after a visit with her mom Heather Unbehaun.
Kayla Unbehaun’s rescue has sparked debate on-line over whether or not dad and mom ought to face costs for parental abduction of their very own youngsters.
Regardless of perceptions about abduction and the way in which our media tends to depict the issue, youngsters being kidnapped by strangers is vanishingly uncommon—non-family abductions account for only one% of abductions in response to the Nationwide Heart for Lacking & Exploited Youngsters.
Amongst all of the sorts of abduction, kidnappings by relations are the most typical, with parental abduction making up the majority of these circumstances by far in response to the FBI. Very similar to within the case of Kayla Unbehaun, who was kidnapped by her mom Heather Unbehaun, non-custodial dad and mom are the most typical abductors. However, Kayla’s story has led some dad and mom to take Heather Unbehaun’s aspect.
Kayla Unbehaun was allegedly kidnapped by her mom Heather in 2017.
Kayla was reported lacking in 2017 by her father Ryan Iserka after she and her mom Heather did not return from a tenting journey.
Ryan Iserka of Elgin, Illinois had been granted full custody of his then-nine-year-old daughter Kayla after her mom Heather Unbehaun had didn’t adjust to earlier court docket orders associated to their custody dispute. Their custody association allowed Heather supervised visits whereas Kayla lived with Iserka, his spouse, and her two daughters.
Iserka agreed to permit Kayla to go on a tenting journey with Heather over the July 4th vacation in 2017. However when he went to Unbehaun’s Wheaton, Illinois dwelling on the agreed-upon time on July 5, 2017 to select Kayla up, there was no signal of both of them.
In a GoFundMe web page, he arrange, Iserka revealed that Unbehaun claimed skipped a custody listening to a month prior on June 7, 2017. Fearing the worst, he instantly reported Kayla as a sufferer of parental abduction, and shortly thereafter found Heather had deleted her whole on-line presence and shut her telephone off. Her lawyer had not heard from her in weeks both.
Kayla Unbehaun was discovered after a North Carolina store worker noticed her on Netflix’s ‘Unsolved Mysteries.’
The story of Kayla’s discovery is really exceptional. She was discovered after the supervisor of a Plato’s Closet clothes store in Asheville, North Carolina reported to native police that she had situated the woman, now 15 years outdated.
The supervisor was alerted to Kayla’s presence by an worker who acknowledged her from an episode of Netflix’s “Unsolved Mysteries” that had centered on parental abduction. However Kayla’s solely presence within the episode was a short look of her image in a montage of age-processed photographs of kidnapped youngsters.
It was sufficient to tip the worker off, nevertheless, who additionally realized that she had recognized Kayla throughout her childhood. Kayla was reported to police, who famous how exceptional it was that Heather Unbehaun had managed to not depart any “technological breadcrumbs” that may have led authorities to her sooner.
Following the Plato’s Closet worker’s report, Heather Unbehaun was instantly arrested and held on $250,000 bond, which she has since posted. She now faces little one abduction costs.
Some on-line have questioned whether or not Heather Unbehaun needs to be charged with abduction for taking her personal little one.
Kayla Unbehaun’s story has left many astonished, and most have celebrated that she’s going to quickly be reunited together with her dad. However some on-line have expressed outrage {that a} mom taking her little woman would even be thought of an abduction.
“That is her mom,” one particular person on TikTok wrote. “you may’t kidnap somebody you gave beginning to.” Others felt Unbehaun should have had her causes for kidnapping her daughter. “Possibly my intestine feeling is improper however I really feel just like the mom was attempting to guard her?”
Others felt that if Kayla have been really in peril she would have been discovered sooner. “A whole lot of mothers undergo custody points… if she wasn’t okay any person would have had reported her,” one consumer wrote, whereas one other commented, “If she was a hazard to her little one why was she discovered protected, somethings not including up.”
After all, these takes do not make a complete lot of sense, and plenty of commenters pushed again by stating the plain. “Everybody’s saying mothers can’t kidnap their youngsters,” one consumer wrote, “y’all there was clearly a REASON [Unbehaun] solely had VISITATION!”
Followers of the true-crime podcast “The Vanished,” which focuses on abductions, additionally identified particulars the podcast had revealed about what was allegedly behind Iserka and Unbehaun’s custody battle. “The mother was turning into very harmful and the dad solely took custody to guard her medically,” a fan wrote, “he needed shared custody.”
No matter what some on-line suppose, parental abduction is a really actual and unsettlingly frequent downside. The Nationwide Heart for Lacking & Exploited Youngsters says greater than 200,000 youngsters are kidnapped by a member of the family annually, although the group factors out that scores of lacking youngsters are by no means reported.
Regardless of the prevalence of the issue, the excellent news is that the overwhelming majority of kidnapped youngsters are recovered alive these days attributable to technological advances. Fortunately, even when it took six years, Kayla Unbehaun is one in all them.
John Sundholm is a information and leisure author who covers crime, social justice and human curiosity subjects.
