Seneca Nation, Pennsylvania on opposite sides of child custody dispute
By Michael Beebe NEWS STAFF REPORTER
Updated: 05/03/08 8:41 AM
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- Amanda Prechtel fears she’ll never see her daughter Marissa again if the little girl is returned to the Seneca Nation.
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Four-year-old Marissa Prechtel’s father is a Seneca Indian, and her mother is not. So under the Seneca tradition of passing on bloodlines through the mother, she never can be a Seneca.
But that didn’t stop Seneca marshals of the Allegany Reservation in Salamanca last week from traveling an hour south to St. Marys, Pa., where they tried to serve a custody order from the Seneca Peacemaker’s Court.
The marshals went to pick up Marissa and return her to her father, Kevin McGonnell, a Seneca who lives in Salamanca, according to Marissa’s mother, Amanda.
She kept the child after her last visit and says she has no intention of returning her to the Seneca court system.
“The Seneca marshals came to my house,” Amanda Prechtel said, “but I didn’t answer the door.
“Then they went to my grandmother’s house,” she said. “She’s 73 years old. They pounded on her door. They busted her door. They even tried to open it up.”
The Seneca marshals, the law enforcement arm of the Seneca Nation of Indians, left empty-handed.
Officials in Elk County, Pa., said the order the Seneca marshals presented from the Peacemaker’s Court has no official standing in Pennsylvania.
A spokeswoman for the Seneca marshals said she is not allowed to speak to media and referred a reporter to Seneca President Maurice A. John Sr.
Neither he nor McGonnell, the girl’s father, returned calls to comment.
A year after the Seneca courts wrongly claimed jurisdiction over Koby Hammer, a 4-year-old boy with a Seneca father and a non-Indian mother, Peacemakers judges find themselves in the middle of another emotional custody battle.
In Koby’s case, a Seneca appeals court ruled that the lower court lacked jurisdiction because the boy’s mother, Katherine, initially had gone to Erie County Family Court for custody.
The Seneca appeals court never dealt with the argument raised by Michael Waterman, a Seneca and lay advocate in Peacemaker’s Court, who contended the Seneca courts had no legal right to hear the case because the boy is not a Seneca.
Citing the federal Indian Child Welfare Act, Waterman said for Indian courts to have jurisdiction, the child must be a member of the tribe or eligible for membership.
Waterman said both Koby Hammer and Marissa Prechtel are considered by Seneca law to be white because their mothers are not Seneca and the national law gives the Seneca courts no jurisdiction over either child.
Waterman tried making that argument in Peacemaker’s court in the Prechtel case but was told by Judge Norma Kennedy that by the time Waterman was hired last December jurisdiction was already decided.
If Waterman brought up jurisdiction, Kennedy warned him, according to a transcript of the Jan. 8 hearing, he would be held in contempt of court.
Waterman said Amanda Prechtel called him last Wednesday asking what to do when the marshals first banged on her door, and then her grandmother’s, looking for Marissa.
“I said call 911; they have no jurisdiction,” Waterman said.
St. Marys police officers responded to the 911 call. Chief Todd Caltajerone told The Buffalo News that he could not comment and referred questions to Bradley J. Krauss, the district attorney. He did not return repeated calls to comment.
St. Marys police did repair her grandmother’s door, Prechtel said, and told her that if the marshals came back again, they would be arrested.
The Seneca marshals did not check in with his department before going to the homes, Caltajerone said. He would not comment further.
A spokeswoman for Richard A. Masson, a Court of Common Pleas judge in Elk County, Pa., said he transferred Marissa’s case to Peacemaker’s Court because her father’s request for custody came before the mother’s.
She said Masson did not examine the issue of whether the Peacemaker’s Court was legally eligible to hear the case.
Amanda Prechtel said a year after she gave birth to Marissa, she applied for child support payments in April 2005 from McGonnell through McKean County, Pa., where she was living at the time.
Officials there ordered a paternity test; McGonnell was found to be the father, and he was ordered to pay child support. Waterman said that shows that Prechtel was in court before McGonnell, so the case should not have been transferred.
Prechtel said she allowed McGonnell visits with Marissa until March 2007, when he applied for custody with the Seneca Indian Peacemaker’s Court.
She said she first hired an outside lawyer, and then a Seneca lay advocate, Carlton Farmer, to fight the custody case, and then yet another private attorney.
Prechtel, a part-time dental assistant, said she knew from her research that Marissa was not a Seneca and was ineligible for membership.
But Kennedy, along with fellow Peacemaker judges Margaret Abrams and Marilyn C. George, ruled against her, granting custody to McGonnell and his fiancee, Kristin LaCroix.
Prechtel, who had raised Marissa since birth, was allowed visitation rights only.
She hired Waterman in December, and last Monday, had yet another session in Peacemaker’s Court.
At the time, she said, she had a weekend visitation with Marissa, and after the session, failed to return her to her father.
The Seneca marshals showed up in St. Marys two days later.
Waterman said he was outraged by the action.
“I called the president’s office, ‘Did you give permission to send a raiding party down there to grab a white girl?’ ” Waterman said. “The judges don’t have authority to send the marshals off the territory, only the president does.”
After Prechtel took the child, the Peacemaker’s judges issued an order, terminating her visitation rights and granting full parental rights to McGonnell.
Prechtel has no plans to return her daughter to the Seneca Nation.
“She does not want to go back there,” she said of Marissa. “I’m afraid if I let her go back to that nation, I’ll never see her again.
“I don’t know what to do,” she said. “I can’t run my whole life. No other mother should ever have to go through this again.”
