U.S. Retrieves Utah Child from Cuba in Kidnapping Case

Federal authorities dispatched a U.S. government plane to Cuba on April 21 to retrieve a 10-year-old child from Utah amid an international parental kidnapping investigation tied to a custody dispute involving the child's gender identity. The child, assigned male at birth but identifying as female, was located in Havana and returned to the biological mother in Logan, Utah, the day after the operation.

Rose InessaEthington, a transgender woman and one of the child's biological parents, along with her partner Blue InessaEthington, face federal charges of international parental kidnapping. According to a criminal complaint filed in U.S. District Court in Utah, the couple took the child and Blue's 3-year-old on what they described as a camping trip to Canada starting March 28. Instead of staying in Canada, they flew from Vancouver to Mexico and then to Cuba on April 1, using U.S. passports. The pair turned off their phones after notifying the child's biological mother of their arrival in Canada, and the 10-year-old was not returned as scheduled on April 3, prompting a missing-person report in Logan, a city about 70 miles north of Salt Lake City.

Logan Police Chief Jeff Simmons stated...