Hostage Nation by Victoria Bruce

Author:Victoria Bruce [Bruce, Victoria]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-59358-0
Published: 2015-09-03T16:00:00+00:00

14

Capture and Extradition

For a few days in October 2003, after Botero’s footage of the three American hostages appeared in the United States on CBS’s 60 Minutes II, the case was prominent news. At the time, Patricia Medina was working full-time to support her and Stansell’s four-month-old twins and living with her mother, sister, and brother, who helped care for the babies. Northrop Grumman and Stansell’s family in the United States did not recognize the twins as Stansell’s, and therefore, Medina received no financial support. To try to get some kind of help, Medina went to the U.S. Embassy, where agents informed her that she couldn’t file any type of paperwork on the boys until she could prove paternity—and to prove paternity, she would need the father’s DNA. (Years later, when she learned that the embassy had a sample of Stansell’s DNA from his older children, Medina was told that it could not be released to her because she was not Stansell’s next of kin.) As difficult as things had been for Medina, she still hung on to the hope that Stansell would be released, and that he would want to have a relationship with her sons. So when Medina heard that there was proof that Stansell was alive, she felt immensely relieved. But her relief was short-lived. Stansell’s message to the world would be like a knife to her heart:

I one hundred percent miss my family. I have … I’m kind of a hard-ass, I apologize. But in my life the two things that really hit me in my heart are my children and my fiancée. And when I feel like sometimes not going on, I think in my mind of my 11-year-old son—and I’m sorry, Kyle, for missing your birthday—and my 14-year-old daughter, Lauren, and my fiancée, Malia. What would they want me to do? And I think most what they would want me to do is to come home. My mother died when I was 14, and she left myself and my brother and my father. And if I die now, the exact same thing is happening to my children, and that’s a very hard weight for me to carry. So what I miss most is my immediate family, and my father and my brother, I love them.

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