The Saga of a Texas Father Losing Away in a Russian Penal Colony

David Barnes simply needed to see his children. When his aircraft landed in Moscow, it had been almost three years since he final heard from his two sons. Luke would now be eleven. Daniel can be seven.* They had been dwelling in an odd nation, talking an odd language, minimize off from everybody they knew again dwelling in Texas. Were they making buddies? Were they becoming in at their new faculties? There was a lot that Barnes didn’t know, however he was positive of 1 factor: His youngsters wanted their father.

In 2019, Barnes’s ex-wife, a Russian-born accountant named Svetlana Boricovna, had kidnapped Luke and Daniel from the Houston suburb of Conroe after failing to win sole custody of the youngsters in court docket. In the United States, there was a warrant out for Boricovna’s arrest. Interpol had issued lacking particular person notices for the 2 boys. In Russia, although, they gave the impression to be past the attain of the legislation.

So Barnes determined to take issues into his personal palms. With the assistance of a detective company, the 64-year-old software program programmer had tracked Boricovna to a luxurious residence constructing in Moscow’s upscale Khoroshyovsky neighborhood, the place she was dwelling with the youngsters underneath a unique identify. Shortly after arriving in Russia, Barnes moved right into a two-bedroom unit in the identical complicated, paying a yr’s lease upfront. He spent his first few days there assembly with a lawyer and making journeys to IKEA to furnish the residence. He needed all the pieces to be prepared for the boys.

Luke and Daniel would by no means see the residence. Barnes was within the Russian capital for simply over a month earlier than he was arrested by the police and charged with having sexually abused his sons again in Texas. The allegations had been made throughout a rancorous, yearslong divorce case in Montgomery County. Investigators with the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services and native detectives discovered inadequate proof of abuse, and the district lawyer had declined to file prices. 

Russian courts proved extra sympathetic to Boricovna’s accusations. Two years after being taken into custody, Barnes was convicted of kid molestation in a Moscow criminal trial and sentenced to 22.5 years, the longest time period given to any of the at the very least six questionably imprisoned Americans at present incarcerated in Russia. Prosecutors relied nearly totally on testimony from Boricovna and forensic interviews with the 2 youngsters. The Texas father is at present being held in IK-7, a Soviet-era penal colony within the small city of Shilovo, in central Russia. Last winter I acquired a sequence of cellphone calls from Barnes from his Russian jail. He informed me that he had misplaced 25 kilos and half his tooth over the earlier 4 years. “It’s been hell,” he stated. The scratchy connection made it sound like he was calling from outer area. He had traveled the world over on an extended shot mission to rescue his youngsters. Now he was the one who wanted rescuing. Barnes begged me to convey a message to the American officers who he believes have deserted him: “Just print that I need help.”

Losing a baby is each guardian’s worst nightmare. Even getting briefly separated in a crowded grocery retailer can provoke sheer panic. When Barnes realized that his ex-wife had fled along with his two sons, his world collapsed. Driven nearly out of his thoughts with grief, he made a determined journey into the guts of a harmful nation. “Until the day I die, I’m going to do what I have to to see my kids again,” he informed a buddy shortly earlier than leaving for Moscow. “I’m never going to stop.”

Determined to see his youngsters, Barnes didn’t understand that he was strolling right into a entice. Over the previous twenty years, dozens of Americans have been arrested in Russia on trumped-up prices after which used as bargaining chips for high-stakes prisoner swaps. But Barnes doesn’t have the political capital of high-profile detainees similar to WNBA star Brittney Griner, Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, or former U.S. Marine Paul Whelan—all of whom had been finally exchanged. And even when Russia needed to commerce Barnes, it’s not clear whether or not the United States desires him again. Few American politicians have been prepared to publicly help an accused baby molester, regardless of how sparse the proof within the case.

This is the story of a Texas child-custody dispute that spiraled into a global diplomatic stalemate. Spanning a long time and continents, the saga includes a number of legal investigations, two trials, and a lurid sequence of allegations and counterallegations. Ultimately, although, it’s a few father prepared to do something to get his youngsters again—and a mom decided to cease him.

Last fall I traveled to Barnes’s hometown of Huntsville, Alabama, the place a lot of his household nonetheless lives. His sisters, Carol Barnes and Margaret Aaron, greeted me on the door of Margaret’s redbrick colonial dwelling within the leafy
Blossomwood neighborhood, east of downtown. Joining them was Barnes’s childhood buddy Paul Carter, a soft-spoken actual property agent.

In the previous 5 years, the household has spent almost $200,000 making an attempt to safe Barnes’s launch, with most of that going to his authorized protection staff in Russia. Every few weeks the household follows a convoluted course of to deposit cash into his commissary account in order that he can buy further meals and make cellphone calls dwelling.

The calls sometimes come early within the morning, Carol stated. She can typically hear different prisoners yelling within the background and suspects that they’re extorting cash from Barnes in change for defense. While supporting their brother, she and Margaret have additionally been caring for his or her 94-year-old father, Jerry, a retired civil engineer who’s struggling with dementia. The sisters have hid his deteriorating situation from Barnes. Carol worries that he’ll die earlier than Barnes is launched. (Their mom, Lois, died in 2012.)

Barnes was born in 1957, on the peak of the Cold War, a battle during which Huntsville performed an outsized half. After World War II, the U.S. authorities chosen the modest Alabama metropolis to host its rocket-development program. At close by Redstone Arsenal, a staff led by former Nazi scientist Wernher von Braun was feverishly constructing and testing long-range missiles in a race towards the Soviet Union for nuclear supremacy. The similar scientists would go on to design the large Saturn V rocket that powered NASA’s Apollo program. Throughout Barnes’s childhood, take a look at launches would rattle home windows throughout the city.

Growing up in Rocket City, Barnes took an early curiosity in science. Carter recalled his buddy disassembling radios to find out how they labored and conducting home-chemistry experiments, one among which began a fireplace that almost burned the home down. In highschool Barnes took a part-time data-entry job at Intergraph, a pioneering Huntsville-based software program firm based by a bunch of former IBM engineers who had labored on NASA steerage programs.

He spent his freshman yr at Auburn University, his dad and mom’ alma mater, earlier than transferring to the University of Colorado Boulder to review physics. A tall, putting younger man with chiseled options, he taught himself piano and adopted the strict diet-and-exercise routine he would keep for the remainder of his life. “David’s a very good-looking guy,” Carol informed me. “He never had problems with women, ever.”

After incomes his bachelor’s diploma, Barnes briefly returned to Huntsville, the place Intergraph had provided him a full-time programming job. But he needed extra out of life than Alabama may supply. After a coworker joked that he appeared like a mannequin, he pursued the suggestion, assembling a portfolio after which signing with an company.

He spent a lot of his twenties being flown world wide for trend shoots, dwelling for stretches in France, Indonesia, and Japan. In {a magazine} commercial from this era, for the Turkish clothes model Carducci, Barnes poses in black leather-based pants and a tan bomber jacket, a shawl wrapped simply so round his neck. His darkish eyes gaze coolly on the digicam, as if daring you to snigger at his flamboyant wardrobe.

By the late eighties Barnes had grown bored of modeling and returned to the United States. Over the subsequent twenty years he lived primarily in Silicon Valley, working at a sequence of tech corporations. In 2007, the yr he turned fifty, he moved to Houston for a job at Intergraph’s native workplace, designing software program for the petrochemical services that line the Houston Ship Channel. He rented an residence within the Montierra, a modern complicated within the Galleria space. One spring day he was studying by the pool when a gorgeous youthful girl caught his eye.

“I thought she was Swedish,” Barnes informed me throughout one among his calls from jail. “She was sitting there video chatting with her mother.” He waited for her to complete the dialog, then walked over and launched himself. The girl’s identify was Svetlana Boricovna. She was a 29-year-old accountant from Russia who had moved to the United States only a few months earlier.

The neighbors turned buddies—after which greater than buddies. Things moved quick. “She was ready to have children, and I was ready to have children,” Barnes recalled. “You know, I had lived around the world. My mom was dying. I thought, ‘I just want to have children.’ She seemed like a good person.”

In February, I reached Boricovna on her cellphone in Moscow whereas she was strolling dwelling from work. She agreed to debate the accusations of kid abuse she’d made towards her former husband and the circumstances of her 2019 departure from the United States. The handful of American media shops that had coated the case had not given her a good listening to, she stated. “I feel silenced. No one cares about the boys.”

Boricovna was born in 1980 in Arkhangelsk, a northern Russian metropolis of round 400,000 residents on the mouth of the Divina River, on the White Sea. Arkhangelsk was the nation’s main seaport till the development of St. Petersburg within the eighteenth century, and it continues to help a sturdy commercial-shipping trade. Boricovna’s father was a service provider seaman; her mom labored as an accountant.

Growing up within the port metropolis—which she remembered as “nice but very cold”—Boricovna studied English in class and made buddies with a handful of American classmates who had been enrolled as a part of an change program. After the scholars returned to the United States, she stored in contact by way of letters. “I just fell in love with American people,” she stated. “They were always so kind and smiling all the time. It was my childhood dream to move to the United States.”

Following in her mom’s footsteps, Boricovna enrolled in an accounting program on the native department of Moscow State University, transferring to the flagship campus for her senior yr. She stayed within the capital to attend graduate faculty on the prestigious International College of Economics and Finance. After incomes her grasp’s diploma, in 2002, she labored briefly at a producing firm earlier than touchdown at Lukoil, the Russian oil big.

Soon after, ConocoPhillips bought a 7.6 p.c stake within the firm, in a deal reportedly organized throughout a gathering between the ConocoPhillips CEO and President Vladimir Putin. Boricovna’s job was to make sure that Lukoil’s monetary statements met American accounting requirements. Her English fluency allowed her to work with exterior auditors who had been evaluating the corporate for additional investments. In 2007, Boricovna left Lukoil to turn out to be the assistant controller for the Moscow workplace of Weatherford, the U.S. oil area–companies firm, the place her obligations included performing due diligence for native acquisitions. Two years into the job, she was provided a place on the firm’s Texas headquarters.

After securing a company-sponsored inexperienced card, Boricovna arrived in Houston in January 2009. She rented an residence on the Montierra, a 3 minutes’ drive from Weatherford’s twelve-story headquarters. That spring, she met Barnes on the pool. “He was very handsome,” she informed me. “He played the piano. Kind of romantic, I would say. Not like a regular tough-talk man.”

Barnes was totally different from the Russian males she had dated. Once, when she was sick, he introduced her orange juice. They had lengthy conversations about their households and careers. One weekend they took a visit to South Padre Island in Boricovna’s pink Lexus convertible. “He said that he wanted kids so much because his mom was getting older, and he wanted to give her something,” she remembered. “I was like, ‘Wow, I want kids a lot too. We have something in common.’ ”

Less than six months into the connection, Boricovna realized that she was pregnant. She and Barnes instantly acquired engaged. “I remember thinking, ‘Well, he hadn’t known her very long,’ ” Barnes’s sister Margaret informed me. “But it wasn’t a surprise, actually, because it was David.” Barnes had at all times been impulsive. This wouldn’t even be his first spur-of-the-moment marriage ceremony. In the nineties he was briefly married to an exquisite, free-spirited girl he had met in Alabama. They separated after lower than a yr, though they remained in contact.

In October 2009, Barnes and Boricovna acquired married in a Houston courthouse. For their honeymoon, they took a Caribbean cruise that departed from Mobile, Alabama. Several members of Barnes’s household drove down from Huntsville to see them off. They had a tough time getting a learn on their new in-law. “I do not remember really having a conversation with her besides, ‘Hi, nice to meet you, congratulations,’ ” Carol recalled. “You know: ‘I hope you guys make each other happy.’ That was the extent of it.” After an hour of awkward small discuss, Barnes and Boricovna left to board the cruise and the household made the lengthy drive again to Huntsville.

In June 2010, Barnes was within the supply room for the delivery of his first son, Luke. He recalled holding his spouse’s leg to consolation her. In preparation for the child’s arrival, the couple had bought a four-bedroom home on a quiet avenue in Sugar Land, a family-friendly suburb southwest of Houston.

The new dad and mom doted on their son, however their relationship was already unraveling. Boricovna was offended that Barnes didn’t need to have intercourse along with her throughout her being pregnant. Tensions elevated when Boricovna invited her mom, Nadezhda, to briefly transfer in with them to assist handle Luke. Barnes objected, however Boricovna put her foot down. In a journal he stored throughout this era, he wrote that Boricovna informed him that her mom would at all times be a very powerful particular person in her life.

Nadezhda spoke no English, so conversations in the home had been primarily in Russian. She took over the cooking, making conventional recipes that always included onions, to which Barnes is allergic. The girls demanded that he take away his footwear indoors, a Russian customized. When Boricovna insisted that Luke sleep within the couple’s mattress, Barnes started sleeping in a visitor bed room.

In 2011 the household rented out the Sugar Land home and moved into the Millennium Waterway, a luxurious residence complicated in The Woodlands, north of Houston, close to the place Boricovna had taken a job on the well being care firm McKesson. The couple continued to struggle about Luke. Boricovna didn’t like the way in which her husband roughhoused with their son. Barnes thought that his spouse was being overprotective. She appeared obsessive about cleanliness, always asking the boy to scrub his palms. If he acquired soiled enjoying on the park, she would make him change garments as quickly as he acquired dwelling.

Barnes sought refuge from the marital strife in books, train, and work. He had left Intergraph for Aveva, an industrial-technology firm. The job concerned frequent journey, each inside and out of doors the state, to satisfy shoppers. During these journeys, Barnes was typically paired with a burly, good-natured salesman named Chris Schiller. The two males linked over their love of SEC soccer—Schiller was a Texas A&M fan, whereas Barnes rooted for Auburn—and their shared curiosity in philosophy. After work they might get collectively to grill steaks and focus on the which means of life.

Barnes confided to Schiller that he felt like a stranger in his own residence. Boricovna wasn’t assimilating, he complained. All her buddies gave the impression to be Russian expats. She and Luke spoke to one another in Russian. The boy attended a house day care run by a Russian girl. By 2013, when Luke was three, Barnes had had sufficient. He moved into the spare bed room and later into an residence in CityCentre, a stylish mixed-use growth in west Houston.

Around this time, Boricovna filed for divorce, describing Barnes in her petition as an alcoholic and accusing him of “physical and verbal abuse.” When I requested her about these claims, Boricovna acknowledged that they weren’t true. “He wasn’t exactly, like, physically abusive,” she stated. “It was one event. [Luke] and I were living in one room, and he was living in another room. [Luke] was crying or something, and David broke the door. But he never hit me.” Nor, she acknowledged, was Barnes an alcoholic. “He never drank liquor or anything like that,” she stated. “Just wine here and there.”

Boricovna says Barnes finally talked her out of the divorce. “He was crying, saying we’ll get better, we’ll live like a real couple.” Sometime that fall, she and Barnes spent a night collectively. Shortly afterward, she realized that she was pregnant once more. Barnes agreed to maneuver again to The Woodlands and provides the wedding one other likelihood.

But cohabitation remained a problem. In his journal, Barnes recorded near-daily arguments with Boricovna. In October 2013 he wrote that “Svetlana doesn’t want me [to] (1) have friends (2) go out at all. She wants me to
(1) clean for her (2) cook for her so she can socialize with [Luke] and her Russian friends. We almost never go out, she and I.”

That December, Barnes famous that Nadezhda was planning one other lengthy go to. Her arrival meant that he must vacate the visitor room the place he had been dwelling. Rather than share a mattress along with his spouse, he opted to maneuver
to a unique residence in the identical complicated. “I will only return to see [Luke] during the weekends,” he wrote.

Still, Barnes was reluctant to surrender on the wedding—particularly as a result of he and Boricovna had been about to welcome one other baby. But the arrival of Daniel, in April 2014, doesn’t appear to have improved the connection. In a journal entry written lower than three weeks after Daniel’s delivery, Barnes sounds resigned to the failure of the wedding. “As much as I don’t want [Luke] to grow up in a divorced family, I feel I’m beginning to see that will be his only salvation from becoming as screwed up as [Boricovna] and her mom are,” Barnes wrote. On June 3 he wrote, “Well, I guess I need to find a good attorney. Svetlana is not agreeable to discussing a dividing of [Luke’s] and [Daniel’s] expenses.”

Two days later, Boricovna seems to have made her first accusation. “Svetlana is going off the deep end,” he wrote on June 5. “She is accusing me of child molestation.”

According to Boricovna, Luke had made an outcry, the authorized time period for a kid’s report of abuse. “He said, ‘Dad tickles my body and my penis, and it is just a dream,’ ” she informed me. Her description of the outcry has diversified over time. Over time, she has stated the boy accused his father of touching his butt, getting bare, or enjoying along with his feces. (“Svetlana believes dreams are literal,” Barnes wrote in his journal later that month. “The fact that she would immediately accuse me of causing this dream is unforgivable.”)

On June 5, 2014, the day of Luke’s outcry, Boricovna reported the alleged abuse to the Department of Family and Protective Services. A caseworker scheduled an interview with Luke to be performed at Children’s Safe Harbor, a neighborhood nonprofit that gives help to victims of abuse. But when he and his mom arrived for the interview, the boy, who was about to show 4, refused to enter the constructing. “He just shut down,” Boricovna informed me. DFPS closed the case, and Boricovna didn’t file a police report.

In an ominous journal entry from June 7, 2014—5 years earlier than Boricovna took the boys to Russia—Barnes wrote that she doesn’t “understand she cannot keep [Luke] and [Daniel] from me. I truly fear she could leave the country.” Three days later, whereas Barnes was nonetheless conferring along with his lawyer, Boricovna struck first. She filed a second divorce petition, as soon as once more asserting that Barnes was an alcoholic and was bodily and verbally abusive. The new submitting made no point out of kid abuse. Barnes’s lawyer fired again by denying the accusations and asking the court docket to ban Boricovna from “removing the child[ren] from Texas or the United States.”

Boricovna says she fastidiously monitored her son’s conduct over the next weeks for indicators that he had been abused. In July, a instructor at his Montessori day care discovered him within the rest room sporting solely a shirt. His shorts and
underwear had been mendacity on the ground, soaking moist. He informed the instructor that he had put them in the bathroom. When requested why he did it, Luke stated merely: “Because.”

A couple of days later Boricovna was placing the boy to mattress and noticed him take off his underwear and start to play along with his butt. She was so alarmed that she started recording the dialog between her and Luke about his conduct. Their dialog was in Russian. The following excerpt comes from a translation that Boricovna shared with me.

Boricovna: You’re placing your palms in your butt once more? Don’t do it, child. [Luke]. Don’t take your underwear off, please. Why are you taking them off?

Luke: [Breathing.] [Incomprehensible.]

B: Huh? [Luke].

L: [Breathing.] [Incomprehensible.]

B: [Luke]. Why did you’re taking your pajamas off? Tell me please.

L: Because.

B: What are you making an attempt to do?

L: [Giggles.] Dancing. [Incomprehensible.]

B: Dancing what?

L: Dancing. [Incomprehensible.] Me and daddy would stand like this.

B: Stand like that?

L: Yes

B: And how did you stand like that? And what did you do after that?

L: Fight somewhat.

B: Huh? Fight?

L: Yes.

B: What did you struggle with?

L: [Incomprehensible.]

B: Huh?

L: With butt.

B: Fight with butt?

L: Yes.

B: How? Butt at butt?

L: Yes.

B: On the mattress?

L: Yes.

In response to his mom’s insistent questions, Luke added that he and his father “took off underwear and then pet butts.” They would “lay on each other. He would lay on me, and I on him.” They “put on dresses and showed butt.”

Around this time, academics caught Luke and two different boys reaching into each other’s pants. It was a part of a recreation they referred to as Touch the Booty, Luke would later clarify. He stated one among his buddies had provide you with the concept. “We would touch butt inside the pants, on the butt, not the hole where the poop comes out.” Upon studying in regards to the recreation, Boricovna moved Luke to a different faculty.

Following these episodes, Boricovna despatched her son to a baby psychologist, Dr. Lawrence Abrams, who noticed the boy eight occasions over a two-week interval. Boricovna shared copies of Abrams’s handwritten medical notes with me. On July 22, the psychologist recorded the next change.

Abrams: You informed M [Mother] you play w/ poo poo?

Luke: Yes.

A: Does F [Father] too?

L: Yes.

A: What do you do?

L: [No response.]

A: Are you telling me the reality?

L: [No response.]

A: I don’t know for those who’re telling me the reality.

L: [No response. Gives funny look.]

A: Are you telling me the reality?

L: Yes.

During the subsequent session, Abrams, who had apparently additionally spoken with Barnes, knowledgeable Luke that his father had denied enjoying with feces.

Abrams: Did your F play with poo poo?

Luke: No.

A: Do you get bare?

L: No.

A: Why did you inform M one thing totally different?

L: [No response.]

Abrams then introduced Boricovna into the room. She requested Luke if his father performed with poop. Luke answered no. “Then why did you tell me that?” Boricovna requested the boy. Luke stated nothing. Later within the session Abrams requested Luke if he and his father “lay on each other.” At first the boy didn’t reply. Only with “M pushing him for answer” did he say sure. After the session Abrams recorded his impressions in his pocket book: “At this time: Negative, no evidence of sexual abuse.” 

Boricovna continued searching for signs of abuse. “Svetlana would see sexual perversion in four-year-old [Luke] taking the pants off a space monkey doll I had given him, or hiding his pee-pee between his legs around her house,” Barnes wrote in 2022 to ABC News reporter Jared Kofsky, who shared their correspondence with me. “If I was tossing [Luke] up in the air, she would accuse me of fondling his buttocks. She believed that tickling [Luke’s] stomach or knees meant I was using him as an ‘object of desire.’ ” In his journal, Barnes speculated that Boricovna misinterpreted his conduct as a result of she was raised primarily by her mom. Maybe she simply didn’t understand how fathers interacted with youngsters.

Barnes has constantly denied ever touching his youngsters inappropriately. He believes that Luke’s allegations could have stemmed from recollections of
potty coaching. “I had to wipe [Luke’s] butt, which I didn’t like,” he informed me. “He was like, ‘Daddy touched my butt.’ Well, of course I did. But I had to.” Even when Luke was a child, Barnes stated, he had by no means appreciated altering diapers. “I mean, I tried. They wouldn’t let me. Her and her mom liked it.”

As time went on, Boricovna started to surprise if the abuse had actually occurred. Maybe it was only a dream. In a four-page assertion titled “Our Story” that she later gave to Russian authorities, she defined that she “chose to believe that nothing too bad had happened. It was easier to be in denial and believe nothing like that could ever happen to your kids.”

During a mediation session in early 2015, the couple reached a divorce settlement underneath which Boricovna would have main custody and obtain round $2,000 a month in baby help. Barnes would get the youngsters on weekends and for longer durations throughout summers and college holidays. At first, solely Luke would spend the evening along with his father. When Daniel turned three, he would observe the identical association. 

Throughout this era, Barnes and Boricovna met frequently with a {couples} counselor, Mary Sullivan, to assist them alter to coparenting. Sullivan’s medical notes report a sequence of heated arguments, with Boricovna accusing Barnes of kid abuse and Barnes accusing Boricovna of turning the youngsters towards him. After seeing the couple for almost a yr, Sullivan wrote down her impressions of the 2 dad and mom. Barnes: “Credible, no reason to suspect SXAB [sexual abuse].” Boricovna: “Genuine concern for children, not a control tactic.”

For the primary few years after the divorce, Boricovna and Barnes managed to share custody of the youngsters with out main incident. Luke spent weekdays at his mom’s new home, in Conroe, and weekends at his father’s residence. Barnes taught him methods to swim, ice-skate, and journey a bicycle. One summer season, he took the boy to Colorado to go white water rafting and horseback using. On one other event they went tenting in Big Bend National Park.

Then, in 2018, all the pieces blew up.

Over spring break that yr, Boricovna and Barnes met in Galveston to look at Luke, then seven, compete in a tae kwon do event. It was uncommon for each dad and mom to attend one among their youngsters’s occasions, and their interactions had been tense. Rather than sit along with his ex-wife, Barnes spent a lot of the competitors enjoying on one of many health club mats with Daniel, who was about to show 4.

According to Barnes, Daniel requested if he may spend the evening at his residence reasonably than go dwelling along with his mom. This was one thing of a breakthrough. It had been lower than a yr because the youthful boy started spending nights along with his father, and he was nonetheless adjusting to the change. “Daniel was always a bit hesitant about staying [at my place], but would go [when] his brother would say, ‘Come on, we’ll have fun at Dad’s house,’ ” Barnes informed ABC News. “He never wanted to leave once he was there, and we all had a big time.”

If Daniel did make such a request, Boricovna apparently vetoed it. After the event, she drove the 2 boys again to her home, in Conroe, the place she requested them to take showers. As she tells the story, Daniel then lay down bare on the mattress, pulled his knees as much as his chest, then unfold his butt cheeks aside along with his palms. “That’s a very interesting move,” Boricovna stated. “Who taught you this?” Daniel stated his father had taught it to him. “He does it too,” the boy stated. “Then he smells my butt and eats my poop. He touches me and then it feels like I want to poop, but I can’t.”

Boricovna panicked. Everything she had suspected about her ex-husband however couldn’t show now gave the impression to be confirmed. “I realized that I failed to protect my kids,” she informed me. She pressed Daniel for extra particulars. “It’s an interesting thing that he eats your poop,” she stated. “You know that people are not supposed to touch your private parts. Will you be able to tell it [to someone else]?” Daniel replied, “If I tell her, she will go to jail.” (Under questioning within the subsequent civil trial, Boricovna confirmed that Daniel had stated “she.” It stays unclear to whom the boy was referring.)

Barnes believes that Daniel was most likely imitating one of many again workouts he had seen his father do. He informed me that he had by no means touched his son inappropriately, a lot much less eaten his feces. Barnes’s buddy Chris Schiller informed me that the accusation of coprophilia was preposterous. He recalled his personal youngsters utilizing related scatological language. “When they were younger, they would be like, ‘Oh, you eat poop!’ to each other . . . But to use that and say, ‘Oh yeah, David’s eating poop’? It’s absolutely bonkers.” (Child-development specialists consider that “potty talk” can stem from a traditional curiosity about bodily features.)

The subsequent morning Boricovna reported what Daniel had stated to the Montgomery County Constable’s Office, which dispatched an officer to take her assertion. At the officer’s request, Boricovna drove Daniel and Luke to Children’s Memorial Hermann Hospital, in Houston, to endure forensic exams. Lori Long, educated within the Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner (SANE) program, discovered no indicators of damage on both boy’s physique. She collected their underwear for testing and took swabs from their mouths, penises, and anuses.

In her report, Long supplied the next abstract of her dialog with Daniel: “Patient states: ‘My body needs to be check. My penis hurts. My dad pinches it when I sleep like this (grabs and squeezes penis). He scratches and pokes in my butt where my poop comes out and then its hard to poop in the morning. I see him touch my brother [Luke’s] butt when we sleep. My dad thinks I am sleeping but I see him like this (squints eyes slightly opening them) and lay still like I am dead. He thinks I am sleeping but I am not.’ ”

During his personal examination, Luke didn’t repeat any of the allegations he had made in 2014. Instead, he informed Long that “my dad just tickles me and does ‘Alien Ants’ in my ears and sometimes he does this on my knee real hard (grabbing knee). It’s called ‘Horse bites your corn’ and ‘Pain touch’ when he grabs and squeezes my shoulder real hard when I am bad.” Boricovna informed Long she remained “very concerned because of [Luke’s] past behaviors and the outcry that his brother has made that his father may be sexually molesting him.”

The Montgomery County Constable’s Office assigned the case to Detective Adam Acosta, a member of its child-abuse unit. On March 23, 2018, Acosta noticed as social staff tried to conduct forensic interviews with the boys at Children’s Safe Harbor. As in 2014, Luke refused to take part. Daniel was extra cooperative, even volunteering further particulars in regards to the alleged abuse. He informed the interviewer that his father scratched his butt with a “frog biter,” grabbed his penis with a “pincher,” and took images of him whereas he was bare.

Boricovna additionally reported Daniel’s outcry to the Department of Family and Protective Services, which opened its personal investigation. As an excuse to keep away from sending the youngsters to Barnes’s residence the subsequent weekend, Boricovna informed him that she was taking the boys to South Padre Island. The weekend after that she made up a narrative about taking them in another country. When Barnes tried to file lacking particular person experiences, a neighborhood legislation enforcement officer, conscious of the continued investigation, stated he would “look into this issue.”

Meanwhile, Boricovna sought a extra everlasting resolution. On April 4, she filed a authorized movement asking to be named sole managing conservator of the youngsters, which might give her the unique proper to make choices about their care. While contemplating the movement, Judge Tracy Gilbert issued a brief restraining order prohibiting Barnes from having contact with Luke, Daniel, or every other minors. The decide would later enable Barnes to have supervised visits along with his sons whereas the case was ongoing.

Around 6 a.m. on April 5, Acosta and a staff of crime scene investigators assembled outdoors residence 1303 on the Millennium Waterway. When Barnes didn’t instantly reply the door, the police broke it down. Inside, they discovered a raveled man who appeared like he had simply woken up. Acosta escorted Barnes to his patrol automobile, the place the boys talked whereas the residence was being searched.

The detective knowledgeable Barnes that he was underneath investigation for
molesting his youngsters. According to Acosta’s report, “David stated that he believed that his ex-wife, Ms. Svetlana Barnes, was responsible for cajoling his children into making the allegations. David adamantly denied photographing, interacting or touching his children in a sexual manner.” Barnes then “became upset and stated he did not want to answer any more questions because he felt I was trying to build a case on him.”

Police seized two iPhones, two laptops, an exterior onerous drive, a DVD camcorder, and several other flash drives. On a bookshelf, they discovered a pair of gadgets that appeared to match Daniel’s descriptions of the “frog biter” and the “pincher.” Better often called grabbers, or reachers, the devices had been steel poles with a claw on the finish. Barnes, who suffered from again ache, informed me that he used them to drag down his window blinds and decide up gadgets off the bottom.

“[Luke] and I would walk around and pick up trash,” he defined to me. “[Daniel] would be standing there, and I would kind of pinch at him a little bit. But I never pinched his pee-pee.”

Following the search, the police departed with the seized proof. Barnes, who was not underneath arrest, returned to seek out his residence ransacked. After he bought a brand new cellphone, one among his first calls was to Schiller. His buddy instantly drove over. The door to Barnes’s residence was hanging off its hinges, so he walked proper in.

Schiller was dumbfounded to study that Barnes was underneath investigation for baby abuse. “As soon as I heard it, I said it’s a bunch of BS,” he recalled. “I’m sorry, like, I’ve known this guy. I’ve traveled with him. I’ve been around him in his apartment. I was there when his kids were there.” Schiller had additionally seen Barnes play along with his personal youngsters, who had been barely older. “I was like, there’s absolutely no way.”

To symbolize him throughout the police investigation, Barnes employed Andrea Kolski, a brash former Harris County prosecutor. Kolski informed me that Daniel’s outcry instantly raised suspicions for her. “In my history of being a criminal-defense attorney and prosecutor in the child-abuse division, I have never heard of allegations where somebody ate poop, ever, as a part of their sexual fantasies,” she stated.

Kolski despatched Detective Acosta a binder of paperwork that solid doubt on the credibility of the accusations towards Barnes. Among them had been medical notes from Abrams and Sullivan, in addition to the DFPS determination to shut its investigation into the alleged abuse of Luke. Kolski additionally included a written assertion she had solicited from a baby therapist named Joshua Brown. For the earlier two years, Boricovna had been sending Luke to Brown due to “behavior concerns.” Sometimes Daniel attended the periods as effectively.

“[Luke] is always very talkative, playful, and energetic in sessions,” Brown wrote. “The purpose of this letter is to attest that this LPC [licensed professional counselor] has NEVER had a suspicion or report of abuse or neglect (physical, emotional, sexual). This attestation includes but is not limited to [Luke’s] father, David Thomas Barnes. In the event that there ever was a suspicion or a report in the past or future, by law this LPC is to report the concern to the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services.”

Crime-lab technicians didn’t discover Barnes’s DNA on the swabs taken from the 2 boys throughout their SANE exams, nor did they discover the youngsters’s DNA on the grabbers. No proof of abuse was found on any of Barnes’s digital gadgets. Lacking help for the sexual abuse allegations, Montgomery County prosecutor Nancy Hebert determined to not take the case to a grand jury. “[Daniel] made what I considered a fairly credible outcry at the age of three,” Hebert informed me. “We could never corroborate it, and [Luke] never said a word. So I can’t go forward with a case like that.”

Detective Acosta (who has since been promoted to captain) additionally discovered Daniel’s outcry credible. “There are certain things that children just do not say—or do not say in a certain way—whenever they are victims of abuse or trauma,” he informed me in March. “Ultimately, we decided that this wasn’t a case that we could prosecute. This wasn’t a case that had enough cooperation and evidence to show that the allegations were a hundred percent true.”

In 2018 the Department of Family and Protective Services completed its personal investigation. For the alleged abuse of Daniel, its ruling was “Unable to
Determine.” Regarding Luke’s abuse allegations, the workplace’s conclusion was merely “Ruled Out.”

The DFPS investigation was over, and the legal investigation had stalled, however Boricovna continued to hunt sole conservatorship of the youngsters in civil court docket. In response to her claims of kid abuse, Barnes filed motions accusing his ex-wife of participating in “a series of acts that are calculated to alienate the children from their father,” together with making “false reports of child abuse and child molestation to law enforcement.”

He additionally feared the “risk of international abduction of the children.” Barnes’s divorce lawyer, William Harrison, requested the court docket to safe the youngsters’s passports. Judge Gilbert ordered that the passports be positioned within the possession of Boricovna’s lawyer, C. L. Crawley. When a court-ordered mediation session failed to supply an settlement between the 2 sides, the case headed for trial. Luke’s and Daniel’s fates can be within the palms of a
civil jury.

The trial opened on March 10, 2019, in a wood-paneled courtroom in Conroe,
the seat of Montgomery County. Testimony centered primarily on the allegations of abuse. Boricovna informed the jury that she believed Daniel’s outcry was real and that she was in search of solely to guard her youngsters. During his cross-examination, Harrison requested her when she thought Barnes had began sexually abusing their youngsters.

“Long time ago,” she answered. Why, then, had she agreed to share custody with Barnes of their 2015 divorce settlement? Because Abrams had assured her that there wasn’t any abuse, she stated. “I was forced to believe he was not [a child abuser].” Later, Harrison circled again to Boricovna’s avowed reluctance to share custody.

“Your testimony [was] that you were forced to sign this decree in 2015?”
Harrison requested Boricovna.

“No,” she stated, “I was forced to go into denial and believe that it didn’t happen. I did not—I was not forced to sign that decree.”

“And now [Daniel’s] outcry gave you the opportunity to undo all of that
stuff. Correct?”

“[Daniel’s] outcry confirmed that it did happen and that I didn’t—”

“That what happened?”

“The abuse.”

Among a very powerful witnesses was a court-appointed baby therapist, Theresa Burbank, who had been treating the youngsters since December 2018. Burbank was unable to seem in particular person, so her deposition was learn into the report. In response to questions from Harrison, she said that each youngsters had “definitely verbalized that there’s been sexual abuse.”

But she discovered a few of their allegations puzzling. Daniel, for example, informed her that his father touched his penis and butt whereas he was sleeping. When she requested how he knew this, the boy answered that “his mom had told him.” On one other event he defined that “his brother had told him as well that that had happened.”

Psychologists have lengthy identified that younger youngsters are extremely vulnerable to the ability of suggestion, particularly when the suggestion comes from an authority determine. During the so-called Satanic Panic of the eighties, dozens of academics and day care staff throughout the nation had been convicted of kid abuse based mostly on outlandish allegations that had been later debunked. In the notorious Mineola Swingers Club case of the early aughts, police in a small East Texas city used main inquiries to coax youngsters into making accusations of sexual abuse towards harmless adults.

Burbank stated she had cautioned Boricovna towards inadvertently planting concepts within the youngsters’s heads. “When I began to hear certain things from [Daniel] that, ‘Well, Mom told me this’ or ‘Mom told me that,’ I did immediately discuss that with Svetlana, simply because I wanted to make sure that there was a boundary and that she didn’t cross it.”

She finally concluded that whereas Boricovna could have advised sure concepts to the boys, she was not teaching them. In the deposition, Burbank repeatedly declined to say whether or not she believed Luke and Daniel had been abused. “My role is not necessarily to discern the veracity of [the children’s] statements,” she defined. “My role is to help these children to cope. I give them the skills necessary to understand what’s appropriate and inappropriate and how to make outcries if inappropriate things are happening.”

The last witness to testify was Barnes. “I think Svetlana has coached them towards saying sexual abuse,” he stated. He was requesting main custody “because I care about [the children]. There have been many false accusations and taking the kids to counselors and hurting the kids, and I’m there to protect my kids.” He cited examples of Boricovna’s excessive overprotectiveness, together with taking Luke to docs to verify for mind tumors and colon most cancers.

Asked why he was a greater guardian than his ex-wife, Barnes defined that he “plays with them interactively. I have taken [Luke] skiing. I’ve taught him how to ride a bicycle without training wheels. I’ve taken him canoeing. I directly interact with him. I teach him. I’ve taught him about the universe and God and life.” As he spoke, Barnes broke down in tears a number of occasions.

The points raised by the trial had been complicated, however the jury directions had been easy. All they needed to do was reply sure or no to the next query: Should the joint managing conservatorship get replaced by an order that appoints Svetlana Boricovna Barnes as the only managing conservator of Luke Barnes and Daniel Barnes?

If the jury answered no, they needed to reply yet another query: Should the order that designates Svetlana Boricovna Barnes the conservator who has the unique proper to designate the first residence of Luke Barnes and Daniel Barnes be modified to designate David Thomas Barnes because the conservator who has that unique proper?

After three and a half hours of deliberation, the jury returned with its determination. Civil trials require solely ten jurors to succeed in a verdict, however the reply to each questions was a unanimous no. Boricovna wouldn’t get sole custody, nor would Barnes get main custody.

Around midday on Tuesday, March 26, Judge Gilbert issued a last ruling lifting all restrictions on Barnes’s entry to his youngsters. In essence, the decide was ordering the dad and mom to abide by the phrases of the 2015 divorce settlement. For the primary time in a yr, Barnes would get unsupervised visits with Luke and Daniel. But as he left the courtroom, he had a foul feeling. For at the very least 5 years he had anxious that Boricovna may kidnap their youngsters. Since Daniel’s outcry she had executed all the pieces she may to maintain the boys away from him. How would she react to a court docket order requiring that she
share custody?

The subsequent day, Barnes referred to as his sons’ faculty and realized that Boricovna hadn’t dropped them off that morning. His worst nightmare had come true. The boys had been gone.

Boricovna was infuriated by Gilbert’s order granting Barnes full entry to the boys. “All I knew at that moment was that I could not fail to protect my boys again, as I did in 2014,” she recalled in “Our Story.” “The system failed to believe and protect the boys, but it was my duty as their mom to continue protecting them.” She drove straight from court docket to the workplace of her lawyer, C. L. Crawley, to gather her youngsters’s passports. Crawley informed me that he had no alternative however to give up them. The case was over, which meant that the decide’s order requiring him to carry the passports had expired.

Boricovna then picked up her youngsters from faculty and drove dwelling, the place she hurriedly packed two massive suitcases. She and her mom informed Luke and Daniel that they had been taking a trip to Florida. Only after they arrived at Houston’s George Bush Intercontinental Airport did Boricovna reveal that their true vacation spot was Russia. It can be a one-way journey.

“I told them, ‘Okay guys, the judge made this decision, and you are supposed to go overnight to your dad this Thursday,’ ” she stated. “‘I made a decision that we need to leave because I don’t want you to be hurt. But if you want to stay, we can go back.’ And they said, ‘No, we’re leaving.’ ”

The household flew to Istanbul after which on to Minsk, the Belarussian capital, the place they employed a taxi to cross into Russia. Luke and Daniel, who didn’t have Russian visas, hid underneath a blanket to keep away from detection on the border
checkpoint. Once they had been safely inside Russia, they made their approach to a rustic dwelling owned by one among Nadezhda’s buddies.

Back in America, Barnes instantly reported his youngsters’s disappearance to the FBI, which opened an investigation into a possible worldwide baby abduction. The company was quickly in a position to verify that Boricovna had taken the youngsters to Russia. Beyond that, there was little the American authorities may do. The United States has no extradition treaty with Russia. At the FBI’s request, Interpol issued yellow “missing person” notices for Luke and Daniel. If they traveled overseas, they may very well be detained and repatriated to America. As lengthy as they stayed in Russia, although, they had been out of attain.

The Montgomery County District Attorney’s Office charged Boricovna with “interference with child custody,” a felony. But Hebert, the prosecutor who discovered Daniel’s outcry credible, informed me that Boricovna’s actions had been comprehensible underneath the circumstances. “This is just me being a mom, but my best guess is that she felt like law enforcement wasn’t moving fast enough, and she’s got to turn this kid over for visitation,” she stated. Boricovna, in her view, was simply “a mother faced with an impossible choice.”

Determined to convey his boys dwelling, Barnes first needed to discover Boricovna. To work out the place his ex-wife was hiding, he employed Logan Clarke, a veteran personal investigator in Orange County, California. Clarke’s company, Global Pursuit Investigations, had a long time of expertise engaged on international-abduction instances. “Our team has rescued over four hundred women and children all over the world,” Clarke informed me. “Human trafficking, runaways, kidnapping, everything.”

Working with a Moscow-based surveillance staff, Clarke tracked Boricovna and the youngsters to an residence registered to her mom. Shortly after they positioned her, she moved once more, renting an residence underneath an assumed identify. Clarke’s investigators finally caught up along with her, however a brand new impediment had emerged.

Russia reported its first instances of COVID-19 in early 2020. By March, authorities had halted almost all worldwide flights. Americans had been unable to enter the nation once more till August 2021. The normalization of journey proved short-lived. Six months later, Russia invaded Ukraine, prompting Western nations to sever almost all transportation hyperlinks.

It was throughout that temporary window that Barnes made his fateful journey. His preliminary impulse had been to get well his youngsters and return with them to the United States. Clarke suggested Barnes towards making an attempt to smuggle his children in another country. “After looking at the situation, talking to other detectives that had gone over there, [we realized that] it would be extremely difficult, if not impossible,” the personal investigator informed me.

If he couldn’t convey his children again to Houston, Barnes determined, he must transfer to Moscow. Perhaps he may win custody rights by way of the Russian authorized system. For recommendation, he employed a Russian lawyer named Gleb Glinka. Educated in America and fluent in English, Glinka is likely one of the few attorneys licensed to apply legislation in each nations.

In March, I referred to as Glinka to debate Barnes’s case. “He said, ‘Look, I want to get visitation, and I want to open up a case in family court in Moscow,’ ” the lawyer recalled. Glinka replied that there was no want to come back to Russia. If Barnes retained his companies, Glinka may deal with all the pieces on his behalf. But the American father had already made up his thoughts. “I’ve got to come and see them,” he informed Glinka. The worst that might occur, Barnes figured, was that Boricovna would have him kicked in another country.

Barnes’s family and friends tried to cease him from taking the journey. “I said, ‘It’s Russia. You don’t know what they could do,’ ” Schiller remembered. “But at the same time, as a dad, I get it. You want your kids back.” Carol Barnes rapidly realized that she wasn’t going to vary her brother’s thoughts. “I saw the anguish that he dealt with every day,” she informed me. “I knew I could not talk him out of going.”

Glinka had warned Barnes towards renting an residence in Boricovna’s complicated. What would occur when the 2 bumped into one another? “Given his emotional state, it seemed really dangerous,” the lawyer informed me. “I pleaded with him not to do that. And, if he did do it, to please not cross paths with her.”

Barnes tried to observe this recommendation. For his first few weeks in Moscow, he stored a low profile, leaving the complicated solely to go to Glinka’s workplace or to buy groceries. He resisted the overwhelming intuition to knock on the door of his ex-wife’s residence. Then, on Christmas Day, he was leaving to run an errand when he realized that somebody was following him.

“He was wearing a hoodie, but I recognized his eyes,” Boricovna informed me. This was the second she had been dreading since fleeing the United States. She had managed to construct a brand new life for herself, altering her final identify and taking a job at Lukoil. She had rented an residence in a contemporary complicated protected by armed guards, with a fourth-floor foyer accessible solely with a particular cellphone app. Somehow, Barnes had managed to trace her down. Even scarier, he seemed to be dwelling within the constructing.

Boricovna adopted Barnes for a number of blocks till he descended right into a
metro station. When he acquired dwelling, Barnes referred to as Glinka to inform him in regards to the encounter. “Stay put and wait and see what she will do next,” he recalled the lawyer saying.

Boricovna was not wholly unprepared for Barnes’s sudden look. Shortly after arriving in Russia in spring 2019, she had despatched her assertion, “Our Story,” to quite a few authorities companies. When he landed in Moscow, Barnes didn’t understand that his identify was already in police information.

Five days later, on New Year’s Eve, Barnes bumped into Boricovna once more. This time, she was accompanied by Luke, Daniel, and two older girls. The girls hurried the boys into an elevator and disappeared. Sometime throughout the subsequent few days, Luke apparently reported the incident to the police, who issued a warrant for Barnes’s arrest. When Glinka realized of the warrant, he informed Barnes to go away the nation.

“He was absolutely convinced that as soon as the kids saw him, they would run to him and put their arms around him and say, ‘Oh, Dad, we’ve missed you so much,’ ” Glinka informed me. “He didn’t, in my judgment, sufficiently appreciate how much [Boricovna] had worked them over.”

Barnes started to make preparations to return to Texas. Before he may fly out, nevertheless, he needed to exchange an immigration card he had misplaced. On January 13, when authorities places of work reopened after the two-week New Year vacation, he offered himself at a Moscow immigration workplace. Instead of receiving new paperwork, he was surrounded by police and positioned underneath arrest.

After being fingerprinted at a close-by police station, he was allowed to name Glinka, who dispatched one among his colleagues, Artur Katanski, to the station. Katanski was within the room for Barnes’s police interrogation, which started round 6 p.m. The interview, performed by way of a translator, was noticed by officers from the FSB, the state safety company that changed the KGB after the autumn of the Soviet Union. After a number of hours of questioning, Barnes was taken to jail.

The subsequent day Barnes made his first look in court docket, the place he was formally charged with sexually abusing his two sons. The decide denied Barnes’s request for bail and ordered that he be detained till trial.

In the following months, Glinka fought onerous to get the case dismissed. Russian courts, he argued, had no jurisdiction over crimes allegedly dedicated within the United States by an American perpetrator towards American victims. The decide finally dominated that Russia had “vicarious jurisdiction” due to Boricovna’s Russian citizenship. At no level did the Russian police or prosecutors contact their counterparts in Texas to inquire in regards to the prices that had already been investigated there.

David Barnes’s legal trial started in Moscow on November 16, 2022. He had spent the earlier eleven months in a twelve-person cell in one among Moscow’s infamous pretrial detention facilities, often called SIZOs. During this
interval, he was in a position to write letters, make calls, and obtain visits from American consular officers. “I am focusing my energies on winning my case,” Barnes wrote to his household. “Even though the chances are thin, I think we could and should win.”

The trial came about on nonconsecutive days stretching over the course of greater than a yr. One afternoon, an ABC News photographer captured Barnes arriving at court docket, escorted by a guard in a black uniform. In the picture, Barnes is wearing denims and a long-sleeved mock turtleneck, his palms cuffed behind his again, a stoic expression on his face. A reporter requested if he needed to say something. “I love my boys,” he replied.

Reconstructing the trial is sort of unimaginable. In Russia, instances involving minors are closed to the general public, and transcripts are usually not sometimes manufactured from the proceedings. Barnes was compelled to look at the trial by way of the bars of an iron cage in a nook of the courtroom—normal apply for Russian defendants deemed a safety threat. Perhaps no different function of the Russian legal justice system telegraphs the presumption of guilt extra powerfully than the caging of a defendant like an animal.

Glinka informed me that Luke and Daniel didn’t testify. Instead, the prosecution apparently based mostly their case on police interviews with the boys that had been performed in early 2022, shortly after their father’s arrest. Russian courts typically enable protection attorneys to cross-examine youngsters by submitting written inquiries to a educated psychologist, Glinka stated. But on this case, the decide accepted Boricovna’s argument that the youngsters had been too traumatized to take part. Unlike in an American court docket, Barnes may neither face his accusers nor successfully problem the proof towards him.

English translations of the police interviews obtained by Texas Monthly present that the boys offered variations of the accusations they’d made in Texas. Daniel, who was then seven, drew photos of the “frog biter” and “pincher” and defined that “Dad is bad because he touched me in my butt and pee-pee.” There was one allegation he didn’t repeat. Nowhere in his interview does Daniel point out his father consuming feces.

Luke, by then eleven, supplied the police with a written assertion that combined acquainted accusations with just a few new ones. He now stated his father had masturbated in entrance of him, digitally penetrated his anus, and sodomized him with “a plastic object with a red end and a yellow handle”—apparently one of many grabbers.

“Every time when Dad took the strange actions I told you about, I was asleep or was going to sleep,” the boy wrote. “I awake from the actions my dad did, but I did not show Dad that I was not asleep, I just lay with my eyes closed.” The morning after these episodes, he asserted, his father would threaten to kill his mom and brother if he informed anybody.

After reviewing the assertion, the investigator requested Luke a sequence of
follow-up questions: 

Investigator: Did you ask your father to not do it?

Luke: No, I didn’t, as a result of I used to be shocked of what was happening, I used to be aggravated and scared as if I couldn’t transfer.

I: Are you afraid of your father?

L: Yes, I’m afraid that Dad will do hurt to me or my mother and brother. I’m afraid that I’ll meet him once more and I’m going to name the police directly if I meet him. 

I: Did your mom ask you to inform this story to the investigator in order that your father can be punished?

L: No, all of it really occurred, I’m telling you the reality.

The prosecution’s star witness was Boricovna. Under cross-examination the mom stoutly rejected any try to solid doubt on her youngsters’s allegations. “She was hardcore,” Glinka recalled. “She just kept repeating, ‘This is what my children told me.’ ” The protection was compelled to depend on Barnes himself to rebut the youngsters’s allegations. “I kept him on [the stand] for a long time—at least two or three days,” Glinka recalled.

On February 13, 2024, Barnes was convicted of sexually abusing his two youngsters and sentenced to 21 years in a Russian penal colony. Boricovna introduced Luke to court docket to look at the decision be learn. “He wanted to go to the verdict announcement so bad,” Boricovna informed me. “He said, ‘I want to look him in the eyes.’ ” A video clip aired by ABC News reveals Barnes standing in his cage, surrounded by guards. He seems on the verge of tears, with red-rimmed eyes and a resigned expression.

The verdict was predictable. An estimated 99.7 p.c of all Russian defendants are discovered responsible—the next conviction price than within the Soviet Union underneath Joseph Stalin. Glinka appealed the conviction on procedural grounds, arguing that Barnes had not been supplied with English translations of sure authorized paperwork as required by Russian legislation. The attraction was rejected, and Barnes’s sentence was elevated by a yr and a half. (The state’s skill to impose a extra extreme sentence after an unsuccessful attraction is one other of the Russian authorized system’s many Kafkaesque options.)

Late final yr, after dropping his attraction, Barnes was transferred to the IK-7
penal colony to serve out his sentence. In some methods, he informed me, the distant camp was an enchancment on the Moscow SIZO. The jail holds two different Americans, Thomas Stwalley, a former English instructor convicted of distributing marijuana, and Jimmy Wilgus, a musician who was convicted in a Russian court docket on a cost of indecent publicity. The males, who keep their innocence, have helped Barnes alter to the brand new setting. There’s a jail yard the place he can take quick walks and some rusty barbells he can elevate. But as time has handed, contact with the skin world has turn out to be tougher. He can’t write or obtain letters. Calls are restricted to fifteen minutes. Medical care is rudimentary at finest. “There’s no dental facilities,” he stated. “The only thing they’ll do is extract your tooth.”

For the previous three years Barnes’s household has been working with Global Reach, a Washington, D.C.–based mostly nonprofit that gives free help to the households of Americans imprisoned overseas. Eric Lebson, a former National Security Council officer who serves as Global Reach’s chief technique officer, informed me that the group had executed “extensive due diligence and came to the conclusion that David is innocent of his ex-wife’s claims.”

In 2020, President Trump signed the Robert Levinson Hostage Recovery and Hostage-Taking Accountability Act. Named for a CIA operative who was kidnapped and held hostage in Iran, the legislation permits the secretary of state to designate Americans imprisoned overseas as “wrongfully detained,” making them eligible for a prisoner change. The Levinson Act was meant to assist prisoners who’re detained in nations the place the judicial system “is incapable of rendering just verdicts,” who’re being held in “inhumane conditions,” or who’re behind bars primarily as a result of they’re American.

For causes that stay unclear, two successive presidential administrations haven’t used their statutory authority to declare that Barnes has been wrongfully detained. Carolee Walker, who served as chief of employees for the Office of the Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs within the Biden administration and is aware of Barnes’s case, informed me that she didn’t perceive why he had not been so designated. “I have my own opinions about it,” she stated. “From where I sat, there was no U.S. court judge that validated or legitimized those allegations.”

Texas Senator John Cornyn has been Barnes’s most vocal supporter in Congress. On March 9, U.S. Hostage and Wrongful Detainee Day, Cornyn referred to as on President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio to safe Barnes’s launch. In a press launch, Cornyn’s workplace famous that the Montgomery County legal investigation “found the [child abuse] accusation to not be credible.”

Two months later, Cornyn misplaced the Republican main runoff to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. Barnes’s household has contacted Paxton and his Democratic opponent, state Representative James Talarico, within the hope of enlisting their help. They haven’t heard again. Ted Cruz, the state’s junior U.S. senator, has but to make any public remark about Barnes’s imprisonment and didn’t reply to an interview request for this story.

The State Department declined to make any officers out there for an interview. Citing “privacy and other considerations,” it supplied no details about what steps, if any, are being taken to free Barnes. In a written assertion, a spokesperson informed Texas Monthly that “consular officers from Embassy Moscow visit [Barnes] as often as feasible” and that they “will continue to advocate with the Russian government to make sure he is getting needed medical care and access to his attorney while detained.” Lebson, the Global Reach government, holds native Montgomery County authorities chargeable for sabotaging Barnes’s likelihood of being exchanged. “We believe there is one person in Texas who investigated this who is frustrated that they were not able to develop enough information to get David charged,” Lebson just lately informed me. “We further believe that person has spread rumors about David being guilty, and that has caused the State Department and some elected federal officials to not advocate as hard as they should for David’s freedom.”

In June, Detective Acosta acknowledged {that a} federal agent had contacted him to debate Barnes’s case. “I answered every question like I answered it with you,” he stated. “I don’t know if he’s guilty of these crimes or not. I can tell you from experience investigating these crimes that when a child of that age makes detailed outcries, it draws a red flag for investigators. Because children don’t normally outcry to stuff like that.”

During my first cellphone name with Boricovna, in February, she talked about that Luke needed to talk with me. He had been interviewed by ABC News after his father’s sentencing and was disenchanted that the community didn’t air the footage. “That hurt him a lot,” she stated.

Luke was now fifteen. When I spoke to him the next week, I heard no hint of a Russian accent. He appeared anxious and spoke quickly, however in any other case he gave the impression of every other American teenager, liberally deploying Gen Z argot—“fire,” “low-key,” “chill.” Life in Moscow was good, he stated. He speaks fluent Russian and likes to skateboard, make TikTook movies, and play guitar. His favourite bands are Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd. He was educating himself Eddie Van Halen’s well-known “Eruption” solo. He has made new buddies at his Russian faculty.

There have been challenges. He has nervous tics—again in America, he was identified with Tourette’s syndrome—and struggles with weight acquire and melancholy, each of which he linked to his father’s arrival in Moscow. About the abuse, he stated, “Sometimes I forget about it. But sometimes I remember a bit from what happened.”

Not all his recollections of his father are dangerous, he emphasised. “My dad was actually a good dad. We had a lot of toys; we had stuff to do. But then at night I remember laying there and watching him over me and stuff. It was really scary, kind of. I could barely move. And I remember he’d tell me, ‘If you tell anyone, I’m going to kill your mom.’ ”

I requested if there was something Luke want to say to his father. “I’d ask him why he did it, why he was like that,” he replied. “Why couldn’t he just be a normal dad? He kind of ruined my childhood. I had to move countries. I had to go through all this stress when I was, like, eight, nine years old.” Boricovna informed me that in Texas, she had relied on her Christian religion to get her by way of the troublesome occasions. Now Luke informed me one thing related. “I believe God has a plan for me,” he stated. “Whatever happens is how God intended it to be.”

The impression of Luke I acquired from our interview was of a youngster dedicated to constructing a brand new life in Russia. In the months since, although, one thing appears to have modified. On June 16, Luke’s sixteenth birthday, he confirmed up, accompanied by his mom, on the U.S. embassy in Moscow to use for an American passport. According to a abstract of the assembly ready by an embassy staffer, Luke introduced that he needed to return to The Woodlands to complete highschool. He deliberate on asking one among his mom’s buddies for a spot to dwell.

Embassy employees then organized a name with Barnes to offer him the information. “David got very emotional when he heard this and had many questions about his son,” the staffer wrote. How tall was Luke? What did he love to do? How was he doing in class? “He was very, very happy to hear that Luke wanted to go back to Texas.”

On June 22, Carol Barnes acquired an electronic mail from an deal with she didn’t acknowledge. “Hey, Im [Luke],” it learn. “I wanted to get in contact with you, I can provide proof that I’m me if you want.” This was the primary time anybody in Barnes’s household had heard from both baby since their abduction, and so they had been initially cautious. “It is so nice to hear from you!” Carol replied. “Your family loves you and misses you.” But she additionally requested for proof that Luke was who he stated he was: “Can you please write back to me and let me know what musical instrument you used to have in your room?”

Luke responded with the right reply—a drum package—and hooked up two images of himself as a baby. The Barnes household was elated. But the correspondence quickly took an odd flip. “I heard that you guys are saying that I reverted my testimony, that is not true,” Luke wrote in his subsequent electronic mail. The subsequent day, he requested Carol “to please not interfere with the court. I understand you want to be with me, but I have already decided who I want to stay with. I can visit you guys sometimes if you want, but again, please don’t ask for parental rights in the court. If the court does decide to give me to you, can I ask you to NOT try to force your beliefs on me. I still firmly stand with what my dad did to me, because I lived though [sic] it and I know it’s the truth.”

In July and August the embassy helped prepare two fifteen-minute cellphone calls between Barnes and Luke. It had been seven years since they final spoke, and Luke needed to reconnect along with his father. “My main focus was just to get to know more about him,” he informed me in a current name organized by his mom. Father and son spent a lot of the time reminiscing in regards to the journeys they’d taken to Colorado and New Mexico. Barnes maintained that he had not abused his son. “He was like, ‘You know I didn’t do this,’ ” Luke informed me. “Or he’d say, ‘I hope you change your mind,’ or something like that. And I’d just tell him, ‘No, I’m not changing my mind.’ It was kind of infuriating.”

Carol Barnes and Paul Carter declined my request for an additional name with Barnes, explaining that his psychological state had deteriorated over the six months since our final interview. Carter stated Barnes had been overjoyed to listen to from his son, however the expertise had additionally distressed him—particularly when Luke talked about his worry of being conscripted into the Russian military to struggle in Ukraine. “The kid was pretty much telling him, ‘Hey, I’m going to end up dying if I can’t get back to the United States.’ ” For now, Luke’s return to Texas seems to be on maintain. “We are still in the process of looking for a suitable guardian,” Boricovna informed me. “Personally, I still believe it is much safer for [Luke] to remain in Russia until he turns eighteen.”

Barnes, who’s now 69, could not survive that lengthy. Prison has taken nearly all the pieces from him. The well being fanatic who used to purchase contemporary groceries for dinner each evening now subsists on a food regimen of cabbage, macaroni, and stringy meat. His good-looking face, as soon as featured in trend ads seen world wide, is gaunt from malnutrition. During our cellphone conversations final winter, Barnes’s feelings swung wildly between hope and despair. He described himself as a “political prisoner” and informed me that he has “faith in Trump. He won’t allow me to be left behind.” He doesn’t perceive why his case hasn’t acquired extra consideration. “I’m disappointed in my congressmen for not making me a priority. I’m hoping when you publish, they’ll read this, and they’ll help to bring me home.”

In 2024, Barnes wrote a letter to his sons from his Moscow jail cell.
His household revealed it on the web site they created to advocate for his launch, freedavidbarnes.com. “I love you so much,” the letter begins. “I was devastated when your Mom took you from me. I came to Russia only to see you both legally.” Barnes goes on to explain the life that he and his sons as soon as shared, an attraction to reminiscence ought to Luke or Daniel ever learn the letter. “You guys would build forts in the apartment. We would play laser tag and play with your toys. [Daniel], you very much liked the electronic toys. We would all go to places where they had drums, keyboards, guitars, and microphones, and we would sing and play music together.”

Barnes ended the letter with a easy message: “I think about you every day. I am your father and will always be here for you. Love, Dad.” 

---

*The youngsters’s names have been modified.

Juliet Butler contributed reporting for this story.

This article initially appeared within the October 2026 concern of Texas Monthly with the headline “Husband, Father, Prisoner.” Subscribe right this moment.