On June 14, 2004, David Goldman of Tinton Falls drove his wife, Bruna, their son, Sean, 4, and his in-laws to Newark Liberty Airport to see them off on what he thought would be a two-week trip to Brazil. It was Bruna’s home country; and they had traveled back and forth many times. Goldman did not give the trip a second thought.
What followed makes a harrowing tale because Bruna’s trip wasn’t really a visit. It was an abduction, one that took Goldman more than five years to undo.
Goldman writes his story in A Father’s Love: One Man’s Unrelenting Battle to Bring his Abducted Son Home. He starts by asking himself what signs he could have missed that his marriage was not a happy one. (Bruna’s main complaint, he recalls, was that they weren’t rich.) The bulk of the book relates the serpentine road he traveled through a Brazilian legal system that continued to block his efforts to bring Sean home, even after Bruna’s death. Sean wasn’t returned to Goldman’s custody until after the media and the U.S. government got involved, all the way up to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
A Father’s Love replays of all those reports in one engaging and bittersweet volume.