I knew Montie’s birthday would prove a problem. Montie was Patricia’s baby, turning six years old, Glen moved in with me a few weeks earlier, and Patricia believed she had me on the ropes during the divorce.

          I tried to explain a Guardian Ad Litem to Yvonne the other night at Quarters. The concept is difficult for those unfamiliar with both the concept and reality of divorce in Albuquerque.

          Basically, a Guardian Ad Litem (GAL) is an attorney that the Court appoints to protect the children during a divorce. Legally, the role is limited to acting as the children’s attorney. In reality, during the period of our divorce, the Courts utilized GALS to resolve any parenting issue that the parent’s could not.

          In our case that proved basically everything. Patricia simply would not discuss anything with the attorneys or me and simply acted as she wished. She took Glen to see a MD pretending to be a child psychiatrist and talked her into medicating Glen for depression. When, I objected she sought a restraining order against me.

          Yates had drowned her children a few weeks earlier in Texas and you can imagine my nightmares. Now remember how easy it is to picture my concerns after everything you learned about Patricia through the new stories or my writing. It is a great deal easier today to convince people about Patricia’s mental health and the danger she posed. Imagine what it was like in 2002 when no one believed me, no one except the children and my family. Makes the nightmares a little worse.

          I surrendered my parental authority to the Guardian Ad Litem, John Romero. I did this in order to force Patricia to surrender her parental authority.

          Typical decisions that involve a GAL include time sharing, after school activities, school decisions, and other such issues. During the first few weeks our GAL served, he faced decisions about medicating Glen, if I should keep my firearms, child abuse accusations Patricia made against me, child abuse allegations Patricia made against Glen, and domestic violence allegations Patricia made against me.

          I believe there are few saints on this earth, but John Romero is one of them. I think all of us, to especially include the children, would have been victims of a violent death except for the actions of Mr. Romero. Also, he took the heat for a year from Patricia, much of the hatred she held against Glen and I spewed out against John as the one appointed by the Court to stand between us.

          But John was not perfect, and while he figured out Patricia faster then anyone else, he kept the habit of expecting Patricia to act within reason. To him it seemed perfectly obvious that I would spend time with Montie for his sixth birthday and my concerns were groundless.

          But I knew better and I knew that the best chance for spending time with Montie on that day was planning it out well before hand. I described the facts of the event to the GAL in a letter requesting custody of Jessica and Montie a month later.

Montie’s 6^th Birthday  As early as July 16, 2002 the children’s father requested to spend lunch with the children on the day of Montie’s sixth birthday, August 8^, 2002.

The guardian made numerous attempts to address this issue. Spaced between long periods of failure to respond, Patrice Rae Avery initially stated that the children would be unavailable on Montie’s birthday due to extensive plans. The guardian then requested a schedule of these plans. Patricia Rae Avery never provided the schedule. Eventually, the guardian instructed Patricia Rae Avery to allow the children’s grandmother to pick up the children between 11:45 am and 12:00 pm for the birthday lunch and that the children would be returned by 1:30 pm.

Patrice Rae Avery took serious and abusive steps to attempt to thwart this plan and eventually punished all of the children for attending lunch with their father and grandparents.

• She forced the two youngest children to telephone the guardian’s office and claim that they were afraid to go to their father. Patricia Rae Avery has a long history of forcing the children to engage in such activities. A company employee reports overhearing the daughter Jessica telling her younger brother that ‘she only lies when her mother makes her’.
• When the abuse of the children failed, Patricia Rae Avery then telephoned the guardian and attempted to convince him that the children were unwilling to go. She finally released the children to attend the lunch.
• She then demanded that the oldest child, then staying with his father, attend Montie’s birthday party hosted by Patricia Rae Avery. Despite the father’s concerns about the relationship with Patricia Rae Avery and Glen (at that time the guardian had put Glen on a ‘break’ from his mother. Subsequently, on September 4, 2002, the guardian suspend visitation between Glen and Patricia Rae Avery), the father considered the request reasonable. The father agreed to the request as long as it did not interfere with a commitment previously promised Glen. The second party did and the father freed Glen from the necessity of seeing his mother.
• Patricia Rae Avery responded with a serious of actions
• 1). She and the two younger children made numerous telephone calls to both Glen and his father demanding Glen see her and threatening to cancel Montie’s birthday party if Glen and his father did not comply. The father has a recorded voice mail message where Jessica describes Montie balled up on the floor and crying because his birthday was being ruined. These call continued on until after 9:00 pm that evening
• 2) Patricia Rae Avery forced Montie and Jessica to call their friends and cancel Montie’s birthday party.

Those are the cold facts, the reality is Patricia spending the morning of Montie’s birthday calling the GAL and trying to talk him out of the birthday lunch with me – “The children were scared to see their father”. When this failed, she forced the children to call and make the same claims. When my mother showed up, she threatened my mother with the police and called the GAL to state that Jessica and Montie were hiding in the closet and refusing to come out.

          I am not sure what the GAL told Patricia, I later got the idea that he told her he would be showing up with the police if she did not let the kids go.

          All of this is unknown to me when John called during the lunch and asked to speak with both Montie and Jessica, apologizing for interfering with the birthday celebration. When he got back on the cell with me he remarked that the children did not seem terrified. That was my first true hint of what it had taken to see my son on his sixth birthday.

          The day was not over, Patricia’s anger proved so great that she cancelled Montie’s birthday party, forcing him to call his friends and say the party was cancelled. The two friends they could not get on the phone received personal visits from Jessica and Montie as Patricia made them walk to the friend’s house about the cancelled party.

          My mother cried for the loss of her grandson’s innocence, “He will always remember what she did”. Thinking about this, I came up with the only solution I could. I took the kids to Disneyland over Labor Day. I told my mother “he may remember what she did, but then he could say that his Dad made up for it by taking him to Disney”.

          Of course, Patricia reported the GAL and I to the FBI for kidnapping when she found out we were in California.

 
Reference: Phone Messages left by Jessica on Montie's Birthday (http://www.fatheriam.com/Themes%20Children.htm)