US Mother Returns Adopted Russian Boy like Pair of Shoes

“I am Artyom,” he only said.

He did not have any adults with him. He was wandering over the airport alone until customs officers paid attention to the exhausted child. The boy could not explain anything properly. He only handed them a letter. Employees of the airport were shocked when the letter was translated from English into Russian. Torry Hansen, a US citizen, wrote in the letter that she adopted the child on September 29, 2009. The woman wrote that she did not like the boy, he did not fit her, and she decided to return him like a pair of shoes. The woman sent the child back to Russia.

Custody officers picked the boy from the airport and took him to a police station in the Moscow center.

“The boy had a Russian passport with the US visa and a birth certificate. He also had a boarding ticket. He arrived on board a plane of United Airlines. The boarding ticket said that the child was not accompanied by adults,” Pavel Astakhov, the Kremlin’s commissioner for children’s rights said.

One may only guess how the boy managed to pass through customs in the USA and board the plane without adults. However, as soon as the boy found himself at the police station, officials of the US embassy showed up very quickly.

Russia Today: American parents send adopted boy back to Russia by himself

“They wanted to take the child away, and we had to take quite an effort to leave him here. US officials were trying to assure us that he was a US citizen, but the boy had the Russian passport with a visa. They said that it would be much better for the boy to go to the US embassy,” Astakhov said.

The boy was later hospitalized with exhaustion. Afterwards, he will be accommodated in a Moscow orphanage.

The saddest thing in this story is the fact that the adoption agency, which was in charge of the questions of Artyom’s living in the US foster family, said two weeks before that the boy was doing just fine. Photographs of the happy family and the happy boy were attached to the report, officials of the Russian ministry for education and science said.

The boy could hardly speak after he arrived in Moscow. The people who worked with him in Moscow said that he had so much sorrow and sadness in his eyes. Artyom said that he had not been eating anything for several days. He only had several sweets.