Mother and girl
reunited on KauaiThe father did not
return the child after
a visit five years ago
LIHUE >> A Florida woman and her 11-year-old daughter were reunited on Kauai late yesterday, five years after the woman's ex-husband disappeared in Florida with the child.
The Kauai County prosecutor's office was expected to file notice with state Circuit Court today to start extradition proceedings against the girl's father, Jon Michael Bryan.
Prosecutors with the Palm Beach County state attorney's office have begun the extradition process and will prosecute him, Delray Beach, Fla., police Detective Tom Whatley said in a phone interview.
The case had come to the attention of Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, who referred to it when pushing the National Missing Children's Day, Whatley said. Bush must approve the extradition, said Whatley, who hopes the case is expedited.
Bryan, 45, was arrested by Kauai police on a federal warrant Wednesday when he went to pick up his daughter, Angeline Bryan-Hoercher, at Kapaa Elementary School. He had been living on Kauai under the name John Lee, and his fifth-grade daughter had been using the name Lana Lee.
The child's mother, Elke Hoercher, 40, flew to Kauai yesterday. It was not clear whether the youngster was allowed by Child Protective services to stay with Hoercher, but the two were reunited, officials said.
Hoercher, who appeared at a press conference before leaving Florida, declined to talk with reporters on Kauai last night. Police would say only that she was staying at a hotel.
Bryan and Hoercher were married in 1991 and divorced in 1996. They were given shared custody of Angeline. Father and daughter disappeared during a four-week visitation in July 1998.
Diedre Glendon, vice principal at Kapaa Elementary, said privacy laws prohibit her from saying anything about the case.
"She's very sweet," Glendon said of the girl she knows as Lana. "Our school is very close and she had lots of friends."
Asked whether she had an opportunity to say goodbye to her friends, Glendon only said: "She had closure. I can't tell you any more than that."
Kauai police detectives would not talk about the case yesterday. But Whatley, who reopened the case a year ago, said officers on Kauai told him Bryan's girlfriend, whom they identified as a schoolteacher, said Bryan and Angeline have been living on Kauai for at least four years, and Bryan was unemployed the entire time.
In a profile of the case published in the Palm Beach (Fla.) Post earlier this month, Whatley described Bryan's family as wealthy. He said Whatley's mother, Jean Young, of Sarasota, Fla., has insisted since 1998 that her son and granddaughter may have been murdered.
Whatley said Young has told the media that Hoercher would likely flee the country with her daughter. But Hoercher is a German national who has lived in the United States for 10 years, owns her own home and wholesale/retail business, and plans to move her parents over, Whatley said.
Bryan was charged in Florida with parental kidnapping in 1998. In 2000 he was charged in federal court with unlawful flight to avoid prosecution.
Deputy Kauai Prosecutor Craig DeCosta said it is unlikely the federal charge will be prosecuted. Bryan will be held without bail at least until his first court appearance, which is scheduled for Tuesday.
It was unknown whether he would fight extradition, and, as of late yesterday, there was no indication Bryan had hired an attorney, DeCosta said.
Bryan was arrested as a result of a tip to Delray police.
This month, up to 85 million fliers with pictures of Bryan and his daughter were sent out nationwide by the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, Whatley said.
On Wednesday, Delray police received a call telling them the father and daughter were living on Kauai. The individual knew Bryan and his family and had recognized them from a flier, Whatley said.
According to Whatley, the tipster said: "I'm 150 percent sure this is the kid. You can stop looking. ... I know who this guy is. ... I even got a photograph."
The tipster sent photos of the father and daughter.
"We looked, and we said, 'Holy cow!'" Whatley said that when he saw the picture of Bryan, he immediately recognized the gap-toothed, olive-skinned man with bags under his eyes. "That's when we called the local police," he said.
A Kauai police detective stopped the girl at the Kapaa Elementary parking lot, while other officers captured her father. Bryan did not put up a fight and revealed his true identity, said Whatley.
After seeing Angeline's photo, Whatley said: "That's obviously her, the pretty little girl with long blond hair. I see mom, and I see him and the picture. She looks like both of them, and I said, 'Yeah, that's her.'"
Whatley said Hoercher was due to come in Wednesday to look through the 350 leads he had gone through. He called her to come in early to look at something that "looks juicy."
"When she saw the picture, she just screamed," he said. "She just blew the roof off, she screamed so loud."
After the girl was picked up by Kauai police, he said, Hoercher called and talked to the daughter she had not seen or heard from in five years. When Hoercher spoke in her native language, the little girl remembered her German.
"I was crying like a baby," the 235-pound police detective said yesterday. "It was the highlight of my career. Sixteen and a half years, and I never felt what I felt last night."
Whatley said he spoke to Bryan's girlfriend, a Kauai schoolteacher named Tina Lee. She has been like a surrogate mother to Angeline and was told the natural mother had abandoned her and ran off to a foreign country, Whatley said.
"I told her to check the FBI site, and she was in shock," he said. "She admitted she was duped by him. She had no clue."
The FBI site under "parental kidnappings" shows photos of Bryan and Angeline. The site now says "Captured" under Bryan's photo, and under Angeline's name, "Recovered."
Whatley works in computer crimes and fraud and ordinarily does not work on such cases. But he took over the case a year ago, following three other detectives, and said he just got lucky.
Private investigators had also conducted surveillance on key people outside Florida whom Whatley had homed in on, providing valuable information, he said.
