Tony Tye, Post-GazetteOlga Koutina holds a picture of her son, Daniel Pearsall, who has been missing since August.
Click photo for larger image.
He has blond hair, blue eyes and a medical condition that causes chronic ear infections. He stands 3 feet 5 inches tall and weighs about 36 pounds. He speaks and understands Russian, and has been diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.
Daniel Pearsall, 5, was set to begin kindergarten at West Liberty Elementary, but by the first day of school, he had been missing for a week, abducted by his noncustodial father, William Pearsall Jr. Now his little shoes sit by the front door of his mother's house in Brookline, neatly paired in even rows, waiting.
Some of Mr. Pearsall's relatives and associates believe he could have taken Daniel to Mexico. The FBI has been called in to assist the Pittsburgh and Baldwin Township police in the investigation.
"[Bill] might have told him that I died," said Daniel's mother, Olga Koutina, 33, a Russian immigrant who met Mr. Pearsall, 47, through an international matchmaking agency for so-called mail-order brides. "He might have told him that I didn't want him."
The abduction was the latest blow in a contentious, two-year separation and custody fight between Mr. Pearsall, of Harmony, and Ms. Koutina, who grew up in Saratov, Russia. When Daniel disappeared, Ms. Koutina had a protection-from-abuse order in effect against her husband, who was ordered to take anger management classes. For Mr. Pearsall's weekend visitations with Daniel, the exchanges were ordered to take place at the Zone 3 police station on the South Side.
On the morning of Aug. 22, Mr. Pearsall was supposed to bring Daniel to his day care center, Munchkin University Child Care Center in Baldwin. He never showed up.
Ms. Koutina said her husband was routinely late in picking up and dropping off Daniel, but she felt that something was especially wrong this time.
Mr. Pearsall always picked up his mail at the local post office at the same time every day, but he had not been by for the past five days. His home in Harmony, which had been damaged by flooding last year, was vacant and abandoned, said one of Ms. Koutina's attorneys, Linda Hernandez.
He had filed for bankruptcy, and several months ago, sold some assets, including an apartment building. Mr. Pearsall had been to a bankruptcy hearing in New Castle, Lawrence County, on Aug. 19, right before he picked Daniel up for that last visitation.
"He lost his job, he lost his wife, he lost his house," said Louis Pomerico, Mr. Pearsall's bankruptcy attorney. "I think he had a lot of pressures."
Ms. Koutina believes her husband had been planning to take Daniel for some time. After a recent visitation, she said, Daniel came back crying and hysterical and used a phrase, "out of state," that most 5-year-olds have no concept of.
"He said, 'Bill wants to take me out of state, where I can't see you anymore,' " Ms. Koutina said.
Because of the possibility Mr. Pearsall took Daniel across state lines or international borders, the FBI issued an arrest warrant Sept. 1, not for the underlying charge of violating the custody agreement, but for "unlawful flight from prosecution," FBI spokesman Bill Crowley said.
"It's basically a fugitive situation," Mr. Crowley said.
For now, Ms. Koutina is trying to stay optimistic, mostly by keeping busy. Busy working 12-hour shifts at a nursing internship through Shadyside Nursing School, busy trying to navigate a foreign justice system and decipher stacks of legal documents. Busy taping fliers to storefronts in downtown Ellwood City, Lawrence County.
"I don't know what he eats, what he wears," she said. "He's not going to kindergarten."
Troubled from the start
The marriage was troubled from the beginning, Ms. Koutina said.
She had been a medical resident in forensic and social psychiatry in Moscow when she was introduced to Mr. Pearsall.
She and a friend had applied to the matchmaking agency the previous year on a whim. Ms. Koutina was interviewed and photographed. After hearing nothing for about a year, she had almost forgotten about her application when she received the call from Mr. Pearsall in late 1999.
Ms. Koutina was pregnant by another man at the time. Mr. Pearsall was aware of the pregnancy and agreed to marry her. She said he seemed sweet and nice, promising her and her baby a good life in the United States. When Daniel was born in May 2000, Mr. Pearsall signed his name to the birth certificate, making him Daniel's legal father and granting him parental rights.
"She wasn't sophisticated about the legal system," Mrs. Hernandez said.
The business of mail-order brides holds a significant element of risk for both parties. Mail-order brides are isolated in a foreign land and dependent on their new husbands for immigration status and financial support. Men, some of whom are searching for a more submissive, "traditional" wife, fall victim to scams, or get taken advantage of by women who just want permanent residency status.
Russian mail-order brides are abused "at a terrible rate," said Mrs. Hernandez, who took on Ms. Koutina as a client through the Neighborhood Legal Services Association.
Ms. Koutina said that, as soon as they arrived in the United States, the nice side of his personality disappeared. She said her husband physically and emotionally abused her, making threats of deportation and bodily harm, trying to control her, isolating her from friends. The only good thing in her life was Daniel, she said.
"I'm not the first lady who is from Russia who is in this situation," she said. "A typical American goes to Russia to get nice and younger woman. She knows nothing about the law. She barely speaks English. And it's like exploitation. ... American women sometimes don't believe what's going on."
The two separated in October 2003.
Mr. Pearsall's family offers a drastically different interpretation of the troubled marriage. Ms. Koutina is "mental," and has bad morals, William Pearsall Sr. said. He took exception to all the missing posters plastered around Ellwood City, where he owns an auto repair shop and used car dealership. He said some people had offered to rip them down for him.
"That baby is not missing," he said. "That baby is with his legal father. This is all baloney."
Mr. Pearsall Sr. concedes that his son was not easy to get along with.
"He was a real authoritarian-type personality," he said. "Maybe he thought that she was a Third World woman, and he could control her, that he'd be father, son and holy ghost to her."
But Mr. Pearsall Sr. was suspicious of Ms. Koutina from the beginning.
"All these people want is a plane ticket to the promised land," he said. "It's amazing that a Russian can come in this country and put an American out. ... Maybe my boy will find another woman down there [in Mexico], and maybe the baby will have a better mother."
A hard lesson
After their separation, Ms. Koutina was shocked to learn her husband had filed a motion to take primary custody of Daniel. She didn't realize that a nonbiological parent would have the same parental rights as she did.
"I was like, how could this be?" she said. "It's nonsense. In Russia, this would never happen."
Mr. Pearsall kept his wife busy fighting his motions for custody, Mrs. Hernandez said, in the belief that she would be overwhelmed by a foreign legal system and give up. For the past two years, Ms. Koutina was under court order not to take Daniel out of the country to visit her family in Russia.
"He was a step ahead," Ms. Koutina said, shaking her head. "Every week, I sent him for the visitation. It was my obligation to take [Daniel] to this person, even though I thought he had no rights to him. But I'm a prudent person who follows the laws."
After Daniel was taken, a Butler County court issued an emergency order modifying all previous custody orders, giving Ms. Koutina sole legal and physical custody of her son. According to a 2002 study by the U.S. Department of Justice, called the National Incidence Studies of Missing, Abducted, Runaway or Thrownaway Children, more than 203,000 children were abducted by family members in 1999. Most of these children, 46 percent, were gone for less than a week; 23 percent were missing for less than a day.
First Published: October 9, 2005, 4:00 a.m.
