Jorge Fitz-Gibbon

jfitzgib@lohud.com

Guy Brunetti is far from his Eastchester home, his days spent searching for his missing sons and his nights spent restlessly in a small room he rents by the week in Montevideo, Uruguay.

After more than a year in the South American capitol he is no closer to finding Octavio Brunetti, his 3-year-old son, nor the newborn child he has never met. His wife, a Uruguayan native, is still sought for abducting them.

"I'm here fighting every day with the courts, the lawyers, the police to try to get some action," Brunetti, 47, said in a telephone interview. "I'm by myself and all day. I just focus on the case and trying to find clues. That's basically been my life for the past 16 months, and I'm hoping for a break sometime soon."

Ivanna Soto, 42, is wanted by Interpol, which also lists Octavio as missing under the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction. With them is Brunetti's second son, Luciano, who was born in Uruguay last year during the couple's heated court battle — and whose custody remains in question.

Soto's attorney, Pablo Bonaudi, did not return numerous emails seeking comment. In media reports in Uruguay he has denied his client did anything wrong, and said she feared Brunetti and may even be unaware she is a fugitive.

"I think in this case my client is doing what her motherly instincts tell her, and that she feels threatened and in danger," Bonaudi said in Spanish in a Uruguayan television interview on Nov. 27, 2013. "She believes that our system has not given her sufficient guarantees for her to feel that she and her child would not be harmed."

Court records show that Soto's domestic violence claims, filed only after a Uruguayan appeals court ruled on Oct. 2, 2013, that Octavio must be returned to the U.S., were later dismissed. The following month, when authorities sought Soto to serve her with the order to return the boy, she was already gone.

Three weeks later she walked into a hospital to have her newborn son vaccinated. By the time the hospital visit was reported to police, she and the boys had disappeared again.

Therese Malach, a White Plains attorney who represented Rye Brook resident Thomas Mauriello in the 2009 abduction of his 14-year-old son by his ex-wife, said these cases are often difficult to win.

"I think it's minimal, and it's because you're dealing with outside jurisdictions, outside cultures, and you're dealing with a very young person that can be manipulated while time is passing," Malach said. "It's a very complicated world out there and the law is limited in what it can remedy, especially in family relationships."

Brunetti was working in the garment industry in 1997 when he met Soto at Gambits Lounge, a singles hotspot at the Westchester Marriott Hotel in Greenburgh. She was in the U.S. on a six-month visa, working as a bartender at the Pantanal Brazilian Restaurant in Port Chester.

Brunetti was drawn to the young, dark-eyed beauty, and the two began dating. The relationship continued even after Soto went back to Uruguay, and she made several return visits over the following years. Then things cooled off.

"The last time I saw her was in 2002, and then for seven years I didn't see her," Brunetti said. "We just kept in contact through holidays, birthdays, and on the Internet and Skype and instant messages."

But in 2009 Brunetti's sister asked him to travel with her in Italy. Seizing the opportunity, Brunetti contacted Soto, who was then living in Spain, and arranged a weeklong visit with her as well.

"We started talking about our lives, and she started to talk about me and about how I could be the perfect person to be a father and she wanted to have a family," Brunetti said. "We rekindled the relationship."

They began planning a life together. Brunetti, a native of the Bronx who moved to Eastchester in 1999, hoped to settle down in the U.S. But Soto was homesick, and Brunetti agreed to move into a home her family owned in Montevideo, which he renovated with money from his savings and by remortgaging his mother's co-op apartment.

Over the next two years Soto became pregnant and the couple finally married in Uruguay on July 29, 2011. Three months later, on Oct. 22, 2011, Octavio was born. But making ends meet wasn't easy.

"I told her, 'Look, we have to get back to the States,' " Brunetti recalled. " 'Neither one of us are working. We have no money left.' I had to remortgage my mother's co-op and get a loan because now I had a child coming. All that money went to the house. I had no money here, no job."

The couple returned to the U.S., and Brunetti began looking for work. Soto became pregnant again, and life seemed promising after Brunetti landed a good job as a salesman for an auto parts wholesaler. Then came May 22, 2013.

"Three weeks after I was hired, one day I'm going to work, I come home and my wife tells me, 'I'm going to the library then I'm going to drive around to help my son sleep,' " he said. "At the time she was four months pregnant. So, she wasn't coming home. She wasn't coming home. I was waiting outside getting worried. One car pulled out of their spot and I noticed my wife's car behind it."

He called police, who traced her credit card and found she took a cab to JFK Airport, where she boarded a Copa Airlines flight to Panama, transferring from there to another flight to Montevideo. Brunetti followed her on June 23, 2013.

"I came back to Uruguay and tried to negotiate with her. I said, 'Please, we can't go through this legal battle. Nobody wins, only the lawyers get the money and our kids need this money. After everything we've been through, we don't need this financial burden,' " he recalled. "But she was very hardheaded, very thick-headed."

Brunetti filed for custody under the Hague Convention, seeking to have Octavio returned to the U.S. He lost in the local courts, but on Oct. 2, 2013, an appeals panel unanimously ruled in his favor. Five weeks later, Soto was gone.

Brunetti estimates that he has spent nearly $70,000 looking for his sons, exhausting his savings. Friends in Westchester are now planning a fundraiser. Brunetti also set up a Facebook page and a website to help find his sons, while he and his friends have also established a fundraising page.

"It's really been a mess that I cannot believe," he said. "She thought that she was above the law and could do whatever she wanted. So one day while I was working she saw a window of opportunity, and she took it."

Twitter: @jfitzgibbon

Child Abduction Cases

• On Dec. 22, 2009, 14-year-old Christopher Mauriello of Rye Brook visited his mother in Croatia and never returned. Police issued an arrest warrant for his mother, Tara Bray, who moved to Bosnia. The boy's father, Thomas Mauriello, continued to fight for his son's return but was unsuccessful.

• New Jersey resident David Goldman's fight for his 4-year-old son was a landmark child abduction case. In 2004 his wife, Bruna Bianchi, took the boy on a two-week visit to Brazil and refused to return him. She died in childbirth, starting a lengthy legal battle with her family that ended when the boy was returned to his father on Dec. 24, 2009.

• Jing Kelly of Larchmont was in a custody fight with her then-husband in June 2001 when she fled to China with their 2-year-old son, Tristram. It wasn't until January 2003, after Craig Kelly died from cancer, that she returned and was arrested in Vancouver. Custody of the boy was later given to his father's family after a high-profile court case.

• Patricia Heyman won custody of her three children after divorcing Chaim Yarden. In December 1986, Yarden abducted them in Belgium and went into hiding. He was arrested Nov. 9, 1987 and convicted of kidnapping, but the children weren't found until 1993, living with another family in a Bedford Hills yeshiva.