Imagine thinking you have sorted the divorce, the custody schedule, the whole tedious business of splitting continents and lives, only for one parent to vanish with the kids. Nishika Samaratunga, 34, a British citizen originally from Sri Lanka, stands accused of doing exactly that. Since March she has concealed the whereabouts of her sons Blaine Baier, five, and three-year-old Nathaniel, known as Nate. The boys, both born in the United States and diagnosed with autism, have not been seen at school, nursery or anywhere that might offer them the medical care and routine they desperately need.
Their father, Ben Baier, 43, lives near Denver in Colorado. The children had been living with him there after a Colorado court ruled in October 2024 that he should be the primary custodial parent. By April this year the same court had seen enough warning signs to authorise law enforcement to take the boys into custody, citing imminent danger and the mother's apparent preparations for abduction. She had, it said, unilaterally blocked their court-ordered return. Yet the family had travelled to the UK for what was meant to be a visit. They were last spotted here after that trip and failed to fly back on 29 March. Radio silence ever since.
As of 16 July the children's location remains unknown. Proceedings grind on in the High Court in London, where Ben is fighting to get his sons home. Judges have already ordered banks including JP Morgan Chase and HSBC, Thames Water and the NHS to hand over any scraps of information that might flush the pair out. It is the sort of desperate bureaucratic dragnet that only happens when the basic unit of a family has been ripped apart by one parent's decision to treat court rulings as optional.
The impact is not abstract. These are small boys with autism whose world has been upended, their stability swapped for hiding and uncertainty. A lawyer representing the father described the alleged abduction as deeply harmful. The harm lands squarely on Blaine and Nate. Children do not choose their parents' passports or their parents' grudges. They simply require the steady ground that comes from knowing where they sleep, who collects them from nursery, and that the routines their conditions demand will not be casually discarded.
Ben Baier never believed Nishika would abduct the children and conceal their whereabouts in an effort to keep them from him and uproot them from their home in Colorado. That trust, now shattered, echoes the quiet astonishment many separated parents feel when the other side decides the law no longer applies to them. He has called for the mother to do the right thing and return the children to him so they can return to their life as normal.
The case throws into sharp relief how international custody rows treat children as movable assets rather than people with rights to continuity and care. The parents are divorced. The courts on one side of the Atlantic have spoken. Yet here we are, four months later, with two autistic toddlers off the grid. Stable family bonds are not sentimental nostalgia; they are the scaffolding that keeps vulnerable children from falling. When one parent saws through that scaffolding and expects the rest of us to shrug, something fundamental has been lost.
