*blushing furiously*

The other day I got an email from a man whose missing father was found dead recently. “I have many unanswered questions,” he wrote, “but thanks to you I have one less.” The man explained he had been in foster care as a child and only had vague old memories of his father, and he didn’t know what he looked like. Then he found his dad’s picture on the Charley Project site. So he was thanking me for giving him that knowledge.

A lot of people say my site helps families, but I’ve never heard of it helping in this manner before.

Bryan Dos Santos Gomes’s father to be deported

Three-week-old Bryan Dos Santos Gomes was kidnapped at knifepoint from Fort Myers, Florida in 2006. Three and a half years later, the police don’t seem to know anything more than they did right after it happened. In the investigation it came out that Bryan’s parents are both illegal immigrants from Brazil (although Bryan was born in the US and is therefore an automatic American citizen), but nothing was really done about this, presumably because of the sympathy for their plight and also because Bryan’s mom was a witness to the abduction and her testimony will be needed if they ever catch who did it. The Dos Santoses now have two more children; I believe Bryan was their firstborn.

Well, now it looks like Bryan’s dad, at least, will be deported. He was arrested in November for driving without a license and now the ICE has plans to ship him back to Brazil. Bryan’s mother does not seem to be facing deportation, but she says in this article that if her husband is sent back to Brazil she will have no choice but to join him there. There’s some hope that Bryan’s father will be eligible for something called a U Visa, which allows illegal immigrants who were victims of violent crime to stay in the US for four years.

It’s a very sad situation no matter where you stand on the immigration issue. And I might add that many of the comments on those articles are disgusting. Some people have no compassion at all.