Petaluma woman has tearful reunion with children, but everyone does not live happily ever after [The Press Democrat]

Sep. 16—Editor's note: This is the second of two parts. Read the first part here.

On Oct. 12, 1982, deputies from the Alachua County Sheriff's Office arrested Dennis McCoy as he was moving himself and his three children into a trailer court in Gainesville, Fla.

Forty years later, the youngest sibling — BreAnna was 2 at the time — recalls her older sister telling her how police tackled their father to a bed.

They'd spent six months on the run with McCoy, a former San Quentin State Prison Guard and Air Force interrogator, who had told the children their mother was dead.

In reality, he'd abducted them during a bitter divorce, and taken them on an odyssey through the south.

Their mother, Nan Avants, was very much alive in Northern California, and highly determined to get her children back.

On the night of McCoy's arrest, Nan boarded a red-eye flight to Florida, where her children were being held at a facility for kids taken from their parents.

Through pluck, luck and persistence — "the monumental effort of the victims' mother," as a Santa Clara County prosecutor later described it — she'd tracked them down from 2,300 miles away. Along the way, she had help from private investigators, a sympathetic Mississippi detective and her boyfriend, Del Avants, whom she would later marry.

Her son, Brennan Avants, who was 4 at time, is able to summon only one memory from that time.

"Still firmly planted in my brain," he says, is the memory of his older sister "consoling us, telling us something like, 'See — I told you Mom wasn't dead!'"

When they got to the car, Nan set Bre in her lap. The toddler slapped her — "hit me full on," Nan recalls with a smile. "She was mad at me, because I wasn't around."

They were met at the airport in San Francisco by a throng of reporters and news cameras. "A lot of the baby's gone," Nan said of Bre, in one newspaper account. "She looks so different already."

The older the child, the deeper the imprint, the larger the trauma left by those months on the run. The eldest daughter, who did not wish to be part of this story, remembers "traveling in the trunks of cars," recounts Bre, whose married name is Schafer. "She remembers being left alone. She was in charge of us."

"No memories to forget"

The least scarred of the siblings, Bre became the most curious about their abduction, often pressing her mother, among others, for details.

Sitting at his Gulf Coast home on a recent Sunday, the retired detective Steve Ford held that laminated clipping from the Biloxi Sun Herald, a story detailing the children's rescue.

A San Jose Mercury News article includes a photo of Nan Avants, and her younger brother Tim Hussey, reuniting with her son, Brennan, in 1982. Photo taken in Petaluma on Friday, Aug. 26, 2022. (Christopher Chung/The Press Democrat)

On the flip side of that article, Ford discovered a Post-it note from April 7, 1999. "Out of the blue," he says, he got a call that day from Bre, then 19. "You probably don't remember me," she told Ford, who replied, "Oh, yes I do."

"I've always felt a little hole,"

Bre Schafer

The lack of memories of her father left a void in Bre.

"I've always felt a little hole," she says. She recently found a poem she'd written for an English class during her junior year at Casa Grande High School. Titled "Only a Dead Man Can Know," it begins:

"Photos and stories, that's all I have left/

My father long gone, no memories to forget."

Her older brother had a more turbulent transition. Upon returning to California, Brennan was plagued with night terrors, which eventually subsided. He enlisted in the Army after graduating from Casa Grande, in 1996, and got out four years later.

After 9/11, Brennan re-upped in the Army. His multiple tours included two in Iraq. He is still dealing with post-traumatic stress from that time, during which he saw up close the carnage — the strewn body parts and "charred flesh" caused by IEDs, as he recounts in James Patterson's book, "Walk In My Combat Boots."

Brennan allows that he may be a bit "overprotective" of his wife and 16-year-old daughter. Part of that "watchfulness and hypersensitivity" is PTSD from his combat deployments. And part of it, he believes, is the result of being abducted as a small boy.

He differentiates between Del Avants, whom he considers his dad, and McCoy, "who fathered me." His "passion" to lift others up, through Operation Homefront, is a direct result of being raised by Del, says Brennan. "He was always helping people. Still does."

Brennan holds "no animosity" toward McCoy. By researching his father, talking to McCoy's relatives and acquaintances, the son has gotten "a pretty rounded, holistic picture" of him.

Brennan has letters his father wrote to him and his siblings. "There's two sides to every story," he says, "and he's not around to tell his."

"Our job as adults is to just take all that information and make up your own damn mind."

A "troubled" man

After his arrest in Gainesville, Dennis McCoy was extradited to Santa Cruz County, to stand trial for insurance fraud, to be followed by a trial for child stealing.

On another front, he petitioned California Family Court to restore his rights to visit his children. No matter what he'd done, he told a court-appointed mediator, he shouldn't be deprived of the right to see his children.

Tucked into the Nan's "binder" is the mediator's "Visitation Evaluation." It does not go well for McCoy, who is quoted as saying he harbors "no regrets" for abducting the children because he was removing them from "a horrible situation."

When speaking of his ex-wife, who had the gall to begin seeing another man after they split, McCoy "often refers to her as a 'slut' and a 'whore.'"

In separate interviews, the children informed the mediator that their father told them Nan had died in a car accident. They reported that McCoy sometimes placed a gun on the table when they went to sleep at night.

"Although he can be quite charming and affable on occasion, beneath this façade is a very hurt and very troubled man."

mediator about Dennis McCoy

The mediator also sat with Nan Avants, who struck him, he wrote, as a "resourceful, intelligent and perseverant woman who has a stable relationship with a man and is trying to raise her three children, as well as two of Mr. Avants' children."

Mr. McCoy, the mediator concluded, "was hurt in his divorce from his first wife and searched for a young, dependent woman who would not be a threat to him. He took [Nan's] desire to leave him as a personal insult which he later translated into rage.

"Although he can be quite charming and affable on occasion, beneath this façade is a very hurt and very troubled man."

The mediator recommended that visitation remain suspended for at least "several more months."

But Dennis McCoy would never see his children again.

On the run, again

Convinced, as usual, of his own towering intellect, McCoy represented himself in that insurance fraud case. Ford, the Mississippi detective, flew to California to testify. On March 8, 1984, McCoy was found guilty of insurance fraud.

Three days later, in a separate court proceeding in Santa Clara County, he was convicted of three counts of violating a child custody order.

Back in Santa Cruz, the judge had to decide whether to release McCoy on bond.

That's a bad idea, Nan told anyone who would listen. Without question, he will flee.

McCoy was released on bond. He fled.

He made his way to the Northwest. Using an assumed name, again, he mended fences with estranged members of his own family — and got to know the son from his second marriage.

"I have a lot of good memories from that time, and some not so good."

Jack McCoy

Jack McCoy had no memory of his biological father. After his mother split, "when I was two," he says, he ended up in a series of "boys homes and foster homes" in Spokane, Wash., interspersed with stretches with his grandmother. Around the time Jack was 12, the man he'd known only from photographs showed up in his life.

"He was on the run at the time, living under this other guy's name."

McCoy and his long lost son headed for Oregon. "He liked to hike and fish and hunt," says Jack. "I didn't really like to hunt, but we did a lot of fun things.

"I have a lot of good memories from that time, and some not so good."

In a follow-up email, Jack added that his father had also been abandoned by his mother when Dennis was very young, then bounced around in the foster care system, "which, based on personal experience, can vary from okay to horrific.

"Not making excuses, you choose your actions regardless of your circumstances, but bad circumstances tend to yield more bad results."

Arrested by FBI

After seven years on the lam, McCoy was arrested by FBI agents in Winnemucca, Nev., on Feb. 13, 1990.

Dennis McCoy had confided in his older brother, Michael, that he was planning on killing the judge who'd found him guilty. Afraid that Dennis might actually carry out the threat, Michael reported his brother to the police, who contacted the FBI. Dennis was again extradited to California. He was remanded to Santa Clara County jail, and later transferred to Folsom State Prison.

(Pete McDonnell/For The Press Democrat)

For decades, says Nan, McCoy had smoked two packs of Pall Malls a day. While at Folsom, he was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer and released to hospice care.

Toward the end of his life, Dennis requested time with his children. Nan agreed to a visit "on my terms," she said. She proposed that she and Del and the kids meet him in a secure location, "such as a Kaiser conference room."

McCoy said no. "He didn't want Del there," said Nan. "Only the kids and me."

She refused, "as it was no longer on my terms."

Also, she feared that McCoy, the gun collector and erstwhile firearms instructor, might be planning "to take me out."

Did Dennis have it in him to act violently against ex-wife?

At that point, riddled with cancer, no, Jack McCoy believes.

"Before that? Definitely. I mean, there were times he scared me."

Dennis McCoy died in 1992, at age 46.

Jack is now an artist specializing in stained glass. His studio is in Leander, Texas, 100 miles north of Brennan's home.

"I haven't seen him since COVID started," says Brennan, "but I'm still pretty connected to the guy."

"We're not like, super close," says Jack McCoy. "But I mean, he's my brother."

It's possible, indeed quite probable, they'd have no connection at all, were it not for the legwork, resourcefulness and determination of Nan Avants and her unofficial partner at the Gulfport Police Dept.

Ford, the Mississippi detective who helped Nan recover her children, remembers the keen motivation he felt.

"I had a little boy about the same age as hers," he said.

Asked how it felt to help reunite a mother with her children, reminded of the gratitude that family feels for him to this day, Ford did not reply right away. When he did try to speak, his voice caught. "I'm sorry, you'll have to give me a minute," the salty old detective finally said.

"Please tell them I appreciate it."

You can reach Staff Writer Austin Murphy at [email protected] or on Twitter @ausmurph88.

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