Gonzalez defense seeks dismissal of key charge

SALEM – A Superior Court judge is considering a motion to dismiss a parental kidnapping charge against the Lynn father charged with the disappearance of his 5-year-old son in 2008.Ernesto L. Gonzalez, a 38-year-old former meatpacker, is charged with parental kidnapping and willfully misleading police in the disappearance of his 5-year-old son, Giovanni Gonzalez, who was reported missing on Aug. 17, 2008 by his mother Daisy Colon.She went to pick up Giovanni at his father’s house from a pre-arranged visit at 2 Brightwood Terrace in Lynn and discovered he wasn’t there.Defense attorney Christopher S. Skinner is challenging the parental kidnapping charge in hopes of getting it dismissed.Skinner argued before Judge John T. Lu in Salem Superior Court that because Gonzalez is the biological father of Giovanni and there was no court order concerning the legal custody of his son, he cannot under state law be convicted of the charge and therefore the grand jury heard insufficient evidence to support probable cause to indict.But prosecutor Catherine Semel said because Giovanni was born out of wedlock, legal custody goes solely to the mother and that Gonzalez was never adjudicated to be the boy’s father.Gonzalez had rekindled his interest in Giovanni after not seeing him for almost a year.When Colon went to pick up her son, Gonzalez failed to answer his phone or come to the door.Colon went to police, who eventually entered Gonzalez’s apartment on Brightwood Terrace through an open second-floor window where they found Gonzalez inside a locked room.Gonzalez denied to police that Giovanni had ever been with him that weekend, but several witnesses including a Lynn Community Health Center therapist and a receptionist saw Gonzalez with his son at the facility, prosecutors said.The boy was never located after police combed the city of Lynn.Semel said the grand jury presentation established that Gonzalez had acknowledged his paternity of Giovanni in a Probate court proceeding and was ordered to pay child support, but no judicial determination of paternity was ever established.”The question is did he have custodial rights?” Semel told Lu.Lu took the matter under advisement and continued the case to June 1.Gonzalez, who remains held at the Middleton Jail without bail, has pleaded innocent to both indictments. He faces up to five years in state prison on the parental kidnapping charge and up to 10 years in state prison for lying to law enforcement officers. There is no minimum mandatory punishment on either of the two indictments lodged against him.