Family abductions: urgent, overlooked, real
In 2017, Ryan Iskerka reported his 9-year-old daughter Kayla missing when her mother, Heather Unbehaun, failed to return her after a court-ordered visitation.
Ryan, who had full legal custody of Kayla, was stunned by the response from law enforcement: “Oh well, you know, she’s just a few days late. The law's kind of fuzzy on what we can do here, so we're not gonna act right now.”
She wasn’t late, she had abducted Kayla.
Over the next six agonizing years, until Kayla’s recovery in 2023, Ryan and his wife Lisa’s efforts were hampered by a pervasive belief, not just among law enforcement, but also the media and public, that if a missing child is with a parent, “Well, at least they’re safe.”
That’s not what we’ve seen here at the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC), where family abductions – the second largest category of missing children – can be some of the most violent cases. Family abductions comprise nearly half of all AMBER Alerts, which are reserved for the most critical child abduction cases.
NCMEC is working with families like the Iskerkas to help raise awareness about family abductions and keep their cases alive. Kayla could have been anywhere, but there was little media interest in sharing her story beyond her hometown of Aurora, Illinois.
“We felt unheard in the very beginning,” Lisa said in an interview she and her husband gave NCMEC after Kayla was recovered. “We were trying ourselves to shout from the rooftops. We contacted media multiple times. We had friends contacting media multiple times. NCMEC was the only one who listened. You guys were our advocate; you were our voice.”
At NCMEC, we shared Kayla’s story and our forensic artist’s age progression of what she might look like as she aged on social media, TV shows and in national publications.
The story was picked up across the country but, as often happens in family abduction cases, the searching parent can be scrutinized or worse.
“With me being the father, people weren’t taking it seriously,” said Ryan, who tried to ignore the backlash for the sake of his daughter. “We were desperate to find her.”
Finally, a breakthrough. Kayla, now a teenager, was recognized in 2023 in a Plato’s Closet store in Asheville, North Carolina. Her mother was arrested, and Kayla was reunited with her parents. Investigators say Heather and her daughter had been living most of time in Oregon and had recently moved to North Carolina.
Kayla’s mother pleaded guilty and was sentenced on Oct. 9 to two years’ probation, with time served, and ordered to wear an electronic monitor.
Above all, Ryan and Lisa stressed that law enforcement should not delay taking action in family abductions. These are crimes. Perhaps an AMBER Alert could have brought Kayla home years earlier.
They want people to know that NCMEC can help, particularly in small towns like theirs with fewer resources. Getting national publicity was vital because children are often taken far from home.
The internet can spread a story quickly but can also generate withering comments, especially in family abduction cases. A private couple, the Iskerkas steeled themselves for the sake of their daughter.
Getting therapy and having someone to talk to was critical – both when their daughter was missing and after she came home. Through NCMEC, they were connected to a case manager, who checked in on them and became a liaison with law enforcement, and to Team HOPE, a peer support group.
Now Ryan and Lisa are part of NCMEC which has helped reunite hundreds of thousands of families with their missing children since 1984.
“We were just blown away to learn how much NCMEC has done and all its history,” said Ryan. “NCMEC is constantly evolving. We’re part of that now.”