Ulster mother loses custody battle

A judge has ruled that a five-year-old boy at the centre of an international custody battle will remain in the US with his father, while his mother must return to Northern Ireland.

Circuit Judge Carven Angel ruled that Robert Gunn should have primary residential custody of Dylan.

“I can’t even describe my reaction. I just burst into tears,” Mr Gunn said last night. “There’s no word that can describe the emotion that I felt.”

Mr Gunn, of Dunnellon, Florida, filed for divorce in 2002, after his wife Cara returned to Northern Ireland with their son and her daughter from a previous relationship.

At that time, Judge Angel awarded Mr Gunn residential custody of the boy, who has dual nationality.

Judge Angel wrote that he regarded Mrs Gunn’s decision in August 2002 to leave the US without telling her husband as an example of her “lack of commitment to shared parenting”.

Mrs Gunn, 29, had declined to return until a Belfast court, citing a treaty known as the Hague Convention on Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction, ruled in August that she had to come back to Florida with Dylan for a custody hearing.

Because she lived for a time in the US without a proper visa when the couple were married, she had to get special permission to return to Florida for the hearing held in November. She must leave the country by December 19, and is forbidden from returning for 10 years.

Mrs Gunn has 10 days to request a rehearing, and 30 days to appeal Judge Angel’s ruling.

Mr Gunn’s lawyer, Ron Cole, said he believed she might challenge those restrictions in court in order to live near her son.