Sao Paulo: For the second time in four months, a judge has ordered a Brazilian to relinquish custody of a child to his US father.
In this case, Hilma Aparecida Caldeira, a former member of Brazil's national volleyball team and ex-Olympic contender has been ordered to return her 4-year-old son to his American father, US Embassy spokeswoman Orna Blum said on Saturday.
Contacted in Brazil, the boy's 43-year-old father, Kelvin Birotte of Houston, said the court deadline for him to receive his son is Thursday. He said he had been unable to contact his estranged wife since arriving in Rio de Janeiro, but understood she filed an appeal to the custody order. Caldeira could not be reached for comment. "I'm going to be here until something happens, good or bad," said Birotte, a chef by trade who declined to say how much he had spent on the four-year custody dispute.
Birotte said Caldeira brought their son to Brazil to visit relatives sometime in 2006 and stayed on as she filed the same year for divorce and custody of the child. He last saw his son, also named Kelvin, at a court hearing in 2007. He turns 5 on August 29.
International attention
A separate US-related custody case that attracted international attention was resolved in December, when a Brazilian Supreme Court judge backed a federal court's ruling ordering Brazilian relatives to return 9-year-old Sean Goldman to his father, David Goldman, of Tinton Falls, New Jersey. The case dragged on for five years. The boy's mother, Bruna Bianchi, took Sean to her native Brazil in 2004. She later divorced Goldman and remarried, prompting Goldman to initiate legal efforts to get his son back. Bianchi died in 2008 in childbirth, but Sean's Brazilian stepfather and grandmother continued to fight for custody in Brazil.
