Paulin-Ramirez's Actions Raised Mother's Concerns
By STEPHANIE SIMON
LEADVILLE, Colo.—Slumped on her couch with her cigarettes, her fading photographs and her memories, Christine Holcomb-Mott said she no longer knew what to believe.
Her 31-year-old daughter, Jamie Paulin-Ramirez, had been taken into custody in Ireland, linked to an alleged plot to kill a cartoonist who satirized the Prophet Mohammed.
Mrs. Holcomb-Mott hadn't talked to her daughter in days. She didn't know whether she had a lawyer, a court date, an explanation. But her daughter's behavior over the past few months, including she says, possible correspondence with a foreign national who wanted to take flying lessons in the U.S., unnerved her.
The Wall Street Journal hasn't reached Ms. Paulin-Ramirez and some events that her mother recounts about her daughter's home life couldn't be independently verified. But Mrs. Holcomb-Mott says she had been feeling estranged from her daughter for nearly a year.
Though they lived under the same roof, in a pink-painted house with wind chimes out front, the mother and daughter rarely talked, except to argue about Ms. Paulin-Ramirez's abrupt adoption of the Islamic faith and her decision to veil herself in a hijab. These tensions existed in the household despite the longtime embrace of Islam by Mrs. Holcomb-Mott's husband, George Mott.
Her daughter spent her time at work or online, Mrs. Holcomb-Mott said. Internet connections are iffy in this small, high-mountain town, but she would remain at the computer until 3 a.m. some nights, chatting online with new friends in far-off places, whose pictures she wouldn't let her parents see, Mrs. Holcomb-Mott said.
"I don't know who or what she is any more," Mrs. Holcomb-Mott said. "That scares me."
Her husband chimed in from a corner chair. "Jamie's made her bed," he said, "and she can lie in it."
Though she said she still loved her daughter, she and Mr. Mott have focused their energies on the other member of her family now in Ireland: Their grandson, Christian, who turned six last month.
Irish authorities have released no information about the grandson and it hasn't been possible to determine his whereabouts. His grandparents say they assume he is in the care of authorities in Ireland. They aim to get custody of the boy, even if it means making the case that his mother is an unfit guardian. "I'm so worried about that baby," Mrs. Holcomb-Mott said.
The boy's father, who is Mexican, has made no contact with the family since Christian was a baby, according to Mrs. Holcomb-Mott.
Ms. Paulin-Ramirez and her son moved into the Mott home here in Leadville in 2007. Christian was then a sturdy, chubby-cheeked toddler whom the family nicknamed "Huey," after the old cartoon character Baby Huey, they say. Mrs. Holcomb-Mott even ordered a vanity license plate for her truck: GMAHUEY—for Grandma of Huey.
Ms. Paulin-Ramirez, they say, had lived a scattered adult life. They described her as rootless and searching, running through several marriages, moving from place to place. She went through a period of infatuation with tough street gangs, her stepfather said.
But in Leadville, she seemed to settle down. She worked the morning shift as a clinic medical assistant, setting her alarm for 5 a.m. She took online college classes in the afternoons, working toward certification as a nurse practitioner.
Then last winter, they said she began expressing interest in Islam. "Critical Issues Facing Muslim Women," a video, arrived in the mail for her, along with a variety of texts—including, her stepfather said, "The Al Qaeda Reader," a collection of speeches and online postings about jihad.
Mr. Mott, a practicing Muslim for decades, said he tried to engage Ms. Paulin-Ramirez in conversation about the faith but said she wouldn't talk to him. He wondered how much she really understood, he said. She seemed to lack even a rudimentary knowledge of the Prophet Mohammed's life.
But he said Ms. Paulin-Ramirez began spending hours and hours online, in Islamic chat rooms still bookmarked on her computer. Whenever her parents came into the living room—where she had attached Arabic decals to her keyboard—she would minimize the pictures of the people she was chatting with, they say.
She did tell them about one man she had met online, a foreign national who kept asking her to help him come to Colorado to take flying lessons, said her stepfather who said he yelled at her: "Doesn't that raise a red flag?" Several of the terrorists involved in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks took flying lessons in the U.S.
After a bit, he said, Ms. Paulin-Ramirez no longer mentioned the would-be pilot, but soon after began communicating with another man.
Ms. Paulin-Ramirez told her parents that this new online friend was her teacher, instructing her about Ramadan, they say. But she would be up until 3 a.m. talking with him, leaving her just an hour or two to sleep before work. Her parents suspected an online romance.
They felt powerless. She was 31, an adult, a mother, and they couldn't make her stop, they said.
"I'm not against Muslims," Mrs. Holcomb-Mott said. "I married one." But she felt her daughter's newfound faith was just a phase. "She is the type of person that can be easily brainwashed," the mother said.
Then last fall, on a Friday, Sept. 11, Ms. Paulin-Ramirez told her parents she was driving to Denver for the weekend. She left most of the headscarves she had been wearing since announcing her conversion to Islam, her parents say. She took her son.
When she hadn't returned on the following Monday, missing a scheduled shift at work, Mrs. Holcomb-Mott called the local police. When a week passed with no word from her daughter, Mrs. Holcomb-Mott again called police, saying "her mother's intuition was telling her there is something very wrong," according to the police report.
Leadville Police Sgt. Saige Thomas wanted to help but said there was little she could do. "I explained that Jamie is an adult, and that she could go wherever she wanted to, and practice any religion that she wanted to," the police report states.
A few weeks later, Ms. Paulin-Ramirez contacted her family from Ireland. Mr. Mott said she told him that she had married the foreigner she had met online, that they had changed Christian's name to Wahid, and that he was attending a madrassa, or Islamic religious school.
By now, they said had little interest in talking with Ms. Paulin-Ramirez, tired of her phases, and furious that she had left behind a good job, a new car, a promising start at higher education.
But Christian was another matter. His tricycle still sits in the front yard, half-buried in snow. His grandparents study his pictures. Tears spilling down her cheeks, Mrs. Holcomb-Mott said she called Ireland to talk to him nearly every week since October. She said her heart broke with every conversation.
"He said, Poppa, get your truck and come get me. How're you going to find me, Poppa?" Mrs. Holcomb-Mott recalled.
Last time they talked with him, two weeks ago, Mrs. Holcomb-Mott said she told her grandson that their cat had just given birth to a single kitten, a white and gray puffball no bigger than her palm.
"Name him my name, Grandmamma," Mrs. Holcomb-Mott said her grandson told her. "Name him Christian."
