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SAO PAULO – For the second time in four months, a judge has ordered a Brazilian to relinquish custody of a child to his US father.
In this case, Hilma Aparecida Caldeira, a former member of Brazil's national volleyball team and ex-Olympic contender, was ordered to return her 4-year-old son, Kelvin Caldeira Birotte, to his father, Kelvin Birotte, US Embassy spokeswoman Orna Blum said Saturday.
Blum did not release the father's age, hometown or state. Nor did she say when the judge made his decision or what the deadline was for handing over the child. She said she could not provide further details due to privacy issues.
The US-based National Center for Missing and Exploited Children reports on its website that the boy was abducted from Richmond, Texas, near Houston.
Messages left at a phone number for a Kelvin Birotte in Houston and on Birotte's Facebook page were not returned to The Associated Press on Saturday.
The Globo TV network reported on its G1 website Friday that Judge Joao Cesar Otoni de Matos issued his ruling April 14 and gave Caldeira until next Thursday to hand over Kelvin.
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Birotte recently arrived in Brazil to take his son back home, G1 said, adding that Caldeira's attorneys have appealed the judge's ruling. Neither Caldeira nor Birotte could be reached for comment.
A separate US-related custody case that attracted international attention was resolved in December, when a Brazilian Supreme Court judge backed a federal court's ruling ordering Brazilian relatives to return 9-year-old Sean Goldman to his father, David Goldman, of Tinton Falls, New Jersey. The case dragged on for five years.
The boy's mother, Bruna Bianchi, took Sean to her native Brazil in 2004. She later divorced Goldman and remarried, prompting Goldman to initiate legal efforts to get his son back. Bianchi died in 2008 in childbirth, but Sean's Brazilian stepfather and grandmother continued to fight for custody in Brazil.