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Griffin Dao Yi Guo. Photo courtesy of National Center for Missing & Exploited Children.
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Missing NYC Boy Thought to be Abducted by Father
Mother fears her son will be taken to China
By Heather Harlan
Special to AsianWeek
As each day passes, Camille Colvin can do little but wait and grow more anxious wondering where her missing 4-year-old son, Griffin, could be. The child and his father vanished earlier this month during a court-scheduled visit in Manhattan several days before a custody hearing.
The father, Rui Guo, 39, a Chinese citizen, had allegedly made threats to take the child to China, but authorities do not have any evidence he left the country after the July 8 visit with his son.
Police have issued an arrest warrant for Guo and are working with FBI investigators in an effort to track down the pair. After the police received two tips that Griffin and his father were seen riding the A train in downtown Manhattan, Colvin and her second husband decided to launch their own search. They spent days scouring the streets of Chinatown, passing out pictures of her son, pleading with vendors and shopkeepers for information. Colvin, who speaks fluent Mandarin, said that their efforts received much sympathy — but no new clues. Nevertheless, she still suspects that Guo may be hiding somewhere in the city.
“Rui doesn’t speak English well and can’t navigate the English-language community,” Colvin said. “The Chinese community has been very supportive, and I do believe that at the end of the day, someone there will be able to tell us something that will let us know where they might be.”
Colvin said she believes Guo abducted their son to get revenge because she divorced him last year after he became abusive. “I think this is less about him wanting to be with Griffin and more about him wanting to play out a vendetta against me,” she said. “He has threatened to ruin my life.”
Colvin, 33, said she met Guo in happier days when she was an exchange student at Zhen Zhou University in Hunan Province, China in 1990. They married shortly after and came to the United States, where they lived for a while in San Jose and San Francisco. In 1997, while working as a human resources manager for PricewaterhouseCoopers, Colvin was transferred to China and the couple moved into an apartment in Beijing with Guo’s parents. Griffin was born later that year. While Guo struggled to succeed as a sculptor, Colvin became the breadwinner for the family.
Though she generally got along well with the parents, cultural friction with them and Guo regarding Griffin’s upbringing added even more stress to the faltering marriage. “We had arguments about childrearing,” Colvin said. “For example, I wanted Griffin to use a high chair, but they insisted he sit in someone’s lap while he ate. They also didn’t think it was necessary for him to attend kindergarten, but I wanted him to be in a bilingual environment and socialize with kids his own age.”
Guo grew less and less interested in Griffin, Colvin said. Later, when she discovered she was pregnant with a second child, Guo began emotionally abusing her and forced her to terminate the pregnancy. “By then, our marriage had fallen apart completely,” Colvin said. In the spring of 2000, after 10 years of marriage, she asked Guo for a divorce. He refused and began to threaten her with physical harm. After he took possession of Griffin’s passport, Colvin became increasingly fearful of their safety and she decided it was time to leave. She secretly obtained a new passport for Griffin and abruptly left the country in June for Hong Kong.
“I did call Rui from there and told him we were safe,” she said.
Colvin and Griffin returned to her parent’s home in Boise, Idaho. Over the next two years, Colvin and Guo went through a series of negotiations over the divorce, which Guo continued to be against. Guo moved to the United States but often missed out on visits with his son, according to Colvin. Last fall, after the divorce was finalized without Guo getting any alimony, Colvin moved to New York and married her current husband, Bob Colvin, a fellow Pricewaterhouse employee.
“He’s been a wonderful father to Griffin,” said Camille, “but I always made sure Griffin knew he had a Chinese ni ni (“daddy” in Mandarin) as well, and kept [Guo’s] picture in his room.”
In January Guo also moved to New York, and the custody case was transferred to Family Court and Juvenile Court. Guo continued to have court-appointed visits with his son. He said he was living in Queens, but refused to give Colvin an address or phone number.
“All I had was a beeper number for him,” she said.
When a mediator scheduled an unsupervised, hour-long visit on July 8, Colvin decided to hire a private investigator to keep an eye on them. Colvin said she dropped Griffin off at Barnes and Noble at 86th Street and 3rd Avenue on the Upper East Side at 7:00 p.m. “It was a nice evening, so I encouraged Rui to take him out for a walk,” said Camille. “But I warned him he was being watched.”
The rules were that they had to stay above ground and not take a taxi. Guo was supposed to bring the boy back to Barnes and Noble by 8:00, but they never showed. Camille says she waited at the bookstore until 10:30, before finally calling the police.
“No one has heard from them since,” said Colvin.
Guo also failed to show up at a custody hearing he was scheduled to appear at on July 15. Camille said she called Guo’s parents, but they insist they haven’t had any contact with him either.
“I worry about where they could be hiding,” said Colvin. “Are they being hidden in a warehouse somewhere? If so, is Griffin being exposed to dangerous chemicals or something like that? That’s my concern.”
The first frantic days after their disappearance were somewhat easier for her than now. “There was a lot to keep busy with — meeting with investigators and the State Department, and making sure his picture was on all the missing children websites,” she says. Colvin has also made the rounds to all the local mainstream media as well as New York’s Chinese-language media, which have been closely following the story. “But now there is nothing to do but wait. Waiting — that’s the hardest part.”
Griffin Dao Yi Guo is 3 feet 3 inches and 40 pounds. He has a mole on his back between his shoulder blades and a birthmark on his right cheek. Police ask that anyone with information call 212-452-0636 or 1-800-577-TIPS. The Colvins and PricewaterhouseCoopers are offering a $35,000 reward for information that results in the child’s safe return.
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