At a playground outside the apartment Heather McArthur shared with her young son, she reflects on the last time they spent playing there together.
It’s been seven months since Jacob was home. His bedroom remains exactly how he left it. His paintings are proudly displayed on the wall. His teddy bear sits on a chair; his favourite bright yellow crane truck parked in the corner. There are a bunch of board books in a mini library. McArthur said Jacob was just starting to learn to read.
He turns four years old on Sept. 14.
“He is one of the most kindhearted, spirited little people that I know. I haven’t seen him now for about seven-and-a-half months, which has been hard,” she said.
Jacob’s father, Loc Phu “Jay” Le, took him to Vietnam in February to supposedly celebrate Lunar New Year as part of a vacation cleared by the courts, McArthur added.
“I expected my son to return on Feb. 15, and on that day, I received a note from the father stating that they weren’t going to be coming back,” she said.
McArthur added she received an email from her former partner stating their son had a rash and required “some sort of prescription” to be administered in Vietnam.
“Then the final note was that Jacob had a follow-up appointment on Feb. 28, which is my birthday, and he would get back to us after that date. That follow-up appointment never occurred and there was no communication,” she said.
McArthur said she feared her son was being abducted.
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“I tried to continually reach out to his phone number, and a couple of months ago I received someone on the other line that had the phone number. It had already been reassigned, and so there’s really no way for me to get a hold of them,” she said.
“The family are not willing to connect me with my son in any way or communicate with me in any way.”
Toronto Police released an image of Jacob’s father on May 7 and requested the public’s help in locating him as he was “wanted in a parental abduction investigation.” Le, 41, is wanted on a Canada-wide warrant for abduction in contravention of custody order.
Desperate for information, McArthur travelled to Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam and hired a private investigator.
“I was starting to feel concerned that Jacob could be abducted, so I hired an investigator that basically told me where they were, which wasn’t where I thought that they were supposed to be, and shared some footage of Jacob in sort of situations that didn’t make me feel necessarily comfortable looking at from here,” she said.
McArthur shared a photograph she said was taken by the private investigator showing Jacob on the back of a motorbike with two women. He is not wearing shoes, a shirt or helmet.
McArthur set up a GoFundMe campaign to help her cause.
Nearly 300 people have donated, raising more than $30,000 which McArthur said is being applied to her legal team in Vietnam that is working the case.
“If you’re unable to contribute financially, please think about keeping Jacob’s narrative alive by talking about it, sharing it with friends, urging authorities in Canada to provide international support, and holding him in your thoughts and prayers,” McArthur says on the GoFundMe.
Adding a layer of complexity to the case is the fact that Vietnam is not a party to the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction, which “can help parents with the return of children who have been removed to, or retained in certain countries in violation of custody rights,” according to a Government of Canada website.
McArthur is urging the federal government to step in and help.
“That’s really the only way in these circumstances to retrieve the child is through diplomatic pressure. We’ve done that in the past with countries, and we’ve cooperated in the past in that regard,” she said.
“I’m hopeful that we can continue cooperating in that manner, and that can be an avenue for Jacob to come home.”
McArthur is back in Toronto and plans to mark her son’s fourth birthday at the St. Lawrence Market with close friends and family. She said Jacob loved it there. He also loved cooking.
“It’s just such a privilege to see our kids experience the world. I miss seeing the world through his eyes so much right now… I’ve missed a lot of times with him and as his mom, I have the right to those times and I want to see him again,” she said.
“I want to keep raising him.”
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