Custody Commotion Oregon Accuses WSU Mom Of Custodial Interference Despite Valid Idaho Papers

While it’s common for angry ex-spouses to make off with children in custody disputes, Sean Clark went one better.

Even though his ex-wife had legal custody of their two children, he convinced an Oregon prosecutor and grand jury, the Whitman County prosecutor and the Washington State University police to help him take the kids back and jail their mother.

In the process, he put Lauren Wendt through an interstate legal nightmare. It took her three days to get her two daughters back and further court challenges are pending.

Wendt, 30, pins a large part of the blame on the Whitman County prosecutor’s office for failing to uphold an Idaho order that gave her the rights to her children all along.

“I got lucky,” Wendt said. “I got my kids back in three days. Somebody else isn’t going to be so lucky.”

Her case highlights both the nastiness of such disputes and how complicated they can become once they cross state lines.

Wendt first learned something was amiss last month when a fellow student told her two police officers had been in class looking for her.

On a hunch, she called the Jennings Elementary School in Colfax and confirmed her worst fear: Clark was in the principal’s office.

He had a court order for the children; police had an arrest warrant for her. Minutes later, two Washington State University police had her in a strong-arm hold and under arrest for custodial interference, a felony.

The charges against Wendt were dropped after she was released on bail and showed Oregon officials an Idaho court order giving her custody of the children.

An official in Oregon’s Multnomah County says he was unaware of the Idaho custody ruling when he secured a custody order and a warrant for her arrest.

The Whitman County prosecutor’s office is standing by its actions. With the Oregon order and warrant in hand, it was not up to Whitman County to check out Wendt’s claim of custody, a spokeswoman said.

Wendt met Clark in the Job Corps in 1984 and had two children with him, Danae, 10, and Heather, 8. It was a rocky, sometimes violent union, she said.

Soon after they divorced in 1988, she got primary custody of the two girls. He was allowed only limited supervised visits because, six weeks after the divorce was final, the 5-week-old daughter of a girlfriend of his died in his care in St. Helens, Ore.

Dalton Derrick, a Columbia County district attorney’s investigator, said the child had several suspicious injuries, including head injuries, but he declined to go into details.

Clark, said Derrick, “was questioned more than once by the police, but he was never considered for charges.”

Wendt moved to Idaho Falls, then Boise for a secretarial job, but lost it in early 1989 and had to ask Clark to care for the girls for a few months while she went on public assistance. Wendt took the girls back in April, but he sought custody. In May 1990, she was granted custody in Idaho’s Ada County District Court.

Wendt moved to Pullman to attend WSU after divorcing a second husband in 1992.

She said she asked Clark to have more contact with the girls and possibly visit, but he refused because she insisted he not stay with them.

Reached at his home in Portland, Clark insisted he has custody rights but declined to discuss the details pending a December custody hearing in Columbia County.

He acknowledged being a suspect in the 1988 death of the 5-week-old, but said he didn’t do it.

“In this country you’re supposed to be innocent until you’re proven guilty,” he said. “But I paid for that. I lost my children.”

He also said he is wrongly accused of abusing Wendt, saying he did not contest her restraining orders because “you can’t win.”

“She doesn’t have to prove it,” he said. “All she has to do is say it.”

He acknowledged that he has failed to make custody payments. Asked if he had a job or could afford to keep the children, he declined comment.

In a letter he sent Wendt last month, he said she “stole” the girls. He claimed he had custody under a 1989 stipulation of joint custody struck when she lost her job.

He added she was in violation of Oregon’s custodial interference law.

The Multnomah County District Attorney’s office cited the law to a grand jury, which issued an indictment for two counts of custodial interference.

Keith Meisenheimer, a deputy district attorney in Multnomah County, said he had asked Clark if he could find any Ada County court papers giving Wendt custody.

“His statement to me was he wasn’t able to find any,” Meisenheimer said.

The Ada County prosecutor found none either, he said.

For its part, the Whitman County prosecutor’s office saw no reason to look beyond the Oregon paperwork.

Under an interstate custody law adopted by Oregon, Idaho and Washington, the jurisdiction falls to the court in the state where the last custody order was issued, if one of the parents is still living there, said Julie Ahlers, office administrator for the Whitman County prosecutor.

Wendt told her she had an Idaho custody order, but Ahlers said she concluded it was invalid after verifying the Oregon custody order and arrest warrant with Multnomah County.

Meisenheimer changed his mind when he saw the 1990 Ada County custody order, an order he now says he “didn’t have reason to believe existed.”

In an Oct. 13 hearing in Portland, Meisenheimer dismissed the charges against Wendt.

The interstate squabbling seems far from over, however. While Clark pursues custody in an Oregon court next month, there also is a hearing pending in Whitman County Superior Court, in which Wendt plans to move her custody jurisdiction from Idaho.

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