"Mother did a runner with her own kids, found in Northern Territory"
- Details
- Category: Uncategorised
- Created: Saturday, 20 September 2014 01:33
- Written by Zach Hope - NT News
FROM the side of a road somewhere in Darwin, a fugitive mum and her partner with two boys in tow, makes a desperate phone call she knows will be one of her last acts as a free woman.
The family has been on the run from Western Australian authorities for a week and a half and have made it across the border in a $130,000 rented motor home, which by now is considered stolen.
Without her partner knowing, she has thrown away his phone and the vehicle’s GPS system so police could not use the technology to track her down.
From the side of the road, speaking rapidly, she details how just moments earlier she had taken her boys from an NT Department of Children and Families worker outside Darwin Magistrates Court and bundled them into a friend’s 4WD.
The carer had tried to block her path, but she pushed him out of the way and drove off.
The incident sparked a massive police search ending on Thursday when she was found in the Moulden shops about 10am. Her kids were found safe and well soon after, at a home in Woodroffe.
The call to the NT News, she explains nearly 24 hours before being found, is her last attempt to have someone listen.
“I know it’s a matter of time (until police come),” she says.
“If you met my children you would understand. They want to be with their mum. They are so sad.
“I just don’t know what to do. Do I take someone’s car? You back someone into a corner and what do you do?”
She is unrepentant. She knows she will go to jail but explains “there is no life without my kids”.
Running from Perth was the last resort, she says, but it was the only way to get her children back after nearly two years fighting the WA system.
When her fifth child was stillborn, it sent her into a spiral of drugs and alcohol. She says she voluntarily handed her kids to authorities while she cleaned herself up, which included counselling. She says she was not to know she wouldn’t get them back.
Her two girls, aged eight and nine, are living with stable foster carers who are treating them well. She says the boys’ lives had not been so easy, so they became the priorities in her plan.
The incident outside court in Darwin is the second time she has illegally made off with her children.
Two weeks ago she walked into a Perth primary school dressed as a WA Department for Child Protection and Family Support (DCP) employee at lunch break and told her boys to run with her to the gates.
The primary school and the WA education department were contacted by the NT News but refused to comment.
The family were arrested on Tuesday in Palmerston’s Hub cafe and her children taken, albeit for a short period, into DCF custody.
“Right now there are a lot of tears and hugs – I’m prepared to be arrested,” she says from the roadside.
“I just have to tell my story.”
Yesterday she was back at Darwin Magistrates Court.
She refused legal aid and pleaded guilty to the unlawful use of the motor home and the push and shove on the DCF worker. She was jailed for eight months, suspended after two.
WA police are yet to press charges.
