Andrew DeTolve with son Byron
Mark Peterson
When they held him in their arms for the first time after traveling to Guatemala from their hometown in Montgomery, Ill., the connection was immediate. "We were total strangers, and he didn't cry once," says Andy of the easygoing baby whose birth mom named him Byron. "He was instantly ours."
Over five days of near total togetherness, Jen fell ever more deeply for the newborn's sweet quirks. "He slept on his back with his hands on either side of his head," she says, pointing to a photo of him doing just that."We thought we'd be getting him soon. We were very excited."
From that joyful beginning, however, the family would be plunged into a 5½-year ordeal riddled with heartache, foreign corruption and red tape. The nightmare began in January 2008, when Guatemala shut down all international adoptions amid a headline-making scandal in which locals allegedly faked birth certificates and kidnapped infants – leaving thousands of U.S. families in limbo.
"Our lives froze," says Jen, 44, a radiology technologist. As years passed many families reluctantly gave up on babies they'd hoped to adopt. The DeTolves couldn't. "Byron was our child," says Andy, 41, a firefighter. "We're all he knew as his family. We owed it to him to fight until the day we died to bring him home."
Jen had already begun buying onesies and decorating the nursery when they got horrifying news: Byron's foster mother had been arrested for child trafficking, and Byron had been taken into protective custody.
"We were in shock," recalls Andy. "Where's our son?" No one could, or would, tell them anything. A year passed. "Here I am, a father to this little boy, and he's in trouble, and I couldn't do anything to help him," Andy recalls feeling. "I wanted to explode."
Jen spent endless hours searching Guatemalan adoption websites and message boards. In June 2009 she spotted a cryptic posting on guatadopt.com listing the initials of four boys who had been moved to an orphanage; one set matched Byron's.
"I started screaming to Andy, 'You have to see this!' " says Jen. "We called them and gave them Byron's full name. They said, 'It's him.' "
Andy flew down the next day. "I was nervous – he was a baby the last time I saw him," he says. "Now he could walk." At first Byron just stared at him, "so I pulled out a photo album and said, 'Look, this is tu papa,' " recalls Andy. "When he saw the picture of me in the hammock with him, he jumped into my arms. I started crying. He was saying, 'Papa! Papa!' He would not let me go."
Thrillingly the adoption was back on track; the couple traveled to Guatemala, going to court hearings and bringing teddy bears to Byron. Back home Andy took on extra shifts to pay a tab that would grow to more than $80,000 for legal fees and 16 Guatemala trips.
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