Daniel Hauser may have left the country

http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/05/20/minnesota.forced.chemo/index.html

 

SLEEPY EYE, Minnesota (CNN) — The father of a 13-year-old boy whose family is refusing treatment for his cancer said Wednesday he believes his son and his wife have left the country.

Doctors say Daniel Hauser’s lymphoma responded well to a first round of chemotherapy in February.

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“I will say this: I have left a call to where I think they could possibly be,” Anthony Hauser said from his home in Sleepy Eye, Minnesota, about 85 miles southwest of Minneapolis.

Asked whether he believes that they have gone to Canada, he said, “I’m not saying it’s Canada. You know, that isn’t where I left my call.”

He made his comments a day after a Minnesota judge issued an arrest warrant for his wife, Colleen, who failed to appear with the boy at a court hearing. A judge scheduled the hearing to review an X-ray ordered by the court to assess whether Daniel Hauser’s Hodgkin’s lymphoma was worsening.

A doctor testified at the hearing that the X-ray showed “significant worsening.”

In a news release, the Brown County Sheriff’s Office said the father had been “cooperative” in helping them find his son but added, “the investigators cannot speculate on the sincerity of the information that Anthony Hauser has provided.”

The sheriff’s office has been in touch with the FBI, and the boy has been entered in the Missing and Exploited Children network, it said.

Anthony Hauser testified at the hearing that he last saw his wife at the family’s farm on Monday night, when she told him she was going to leave “for a time.”

He later said he would like his wife and son to return.

“I’d like to tell them, you know, ‘Come back and be safe and be a family again,’ ” he said. “That’s what I’d like to tell them.” Watch father urge the pair to come back »

District Judge John R. Rodenberg of Brown County, Minnesota, said the boy’s “best interests” require him to receive medical care. His family opposes the proposed course of treatment, which includes chemotherapy.

“It is imperative that Daniel receive the attention of an oncologist as soon as possible,” the judge wrote.

During Tuesday’s hearing, Dr. James Joyce testified that he had seen the boy and his mother on Monday at his office. He said that the boy had “an enlarged lymph node” near his right clavicle and that the X-ray showed “significant worsening” of a mass in his chest.

In addition, the boy complained of “extreme pain” at the site where a port had been inserted to deliver an initial round of chemotherapy. The pain was “most likely caused by the tumor or mass pressing on the port,” testified Joyce, who called the X-ray “fairly dramatic” evidence that the cancer was worsening. Watch CNN’s Dr. Gupta discuss Daniel’s chances »

Rodenberg ordered custody of the boy transferred to Brown County Family Services and issued a contempt