Amrex Calling
At this point I had not had a response from the letter that Irina had sent on my behalf. I was under the assumption that nothing was going to be done with it and had put it in the back of my mind. On April 18, I had 2 calls on my Caller ID from Amrex in Alpharetta, Georgia.
I emailed my agency to ask them why Amrex was calling my unlisted home number. No sooner had I sent the email than a Private Call come through. I answered and it was Tracy Kellogg of Amrex calling to ask me some questions.
Now I was very shocked by this call. I had always been under the impression that Amrex did not call families directly and they had called me 3 times in one day. Tracy started by explaining that they ordinarily do not call families, but rather than going through my agency, she wanted to speak to me about the situation at hand.
She immediately asked me whether I had used Irina O'Rear's services. I simply stated that she had helped me to translate a letter requesting my autopsy report and my son's documents. This had been sent to Russia on March 1, 2005, 90 days after my son had died.
She insisted that a formal complaint had been filed in my name at the Moscow Prosecutor's office. I was baffled by this. I told her that I had absolutely no idea what she was talking about.
She then proceeded to discuss Elizabeth Case and her "evil" ways. (For those of you not in the Eastern European adoption community, Elizabeth Case and her husband Daniel lost their son Cyril in Russia 5 years prior nearly to the day that Ethan passed away. The Cases have been very outspoken about the horrible treatment they experienced at the hands of their agency. They also have included stories of many other adoptions gone wrong on their website, www.bewareof bbas.org , this outspokenness has angered many people.) Tracy just did not understand how Elizabeth had such a vendetta against Amrex when they had nothing to do with her adoption. I could not answer this and only indicated that she had emailed me her condolences in December.
Tracy then went on about how Alexander Zakharov from Amrex in Russia had been called and how upset he was. He had tried, in his opinion, to do the right thing in regard to my son. She carried on about how he washed my son's body and arranged his services. I told her that I wanted him to be cremated and would not have left Russia had I known they were going to bury him. I also added that he was very rude to me at the hotel by asking me about whether I cared for Ethan properly, within hours of his passing. She indicated that I must have misunderstood. I knew that I had not.
I told her that I thought it was horrendous that their representative in Astrakhan knew that my son had been hospitalized and that no one had bothered to tell me. She indicated that Amrex had to make some changes in how they relayed information from Russia back to the United States due to my case.
I went on to tell her how badly my situation had been handled. I reiterated that the autopsy report was done on December 24 and that it had taken them 100 days to get it to me. I also indicated that they had kept my documents for 4 months and lied about not knowing where they were. She was going to check on these issues and get back to me. To date I have never had a response to this.
After 45 minutes, and my crying some of the time, we ended the conversation with me in absolute shock and asking her what the next move would be. She indicated that either she or my agency would call me back. Call she did. 2 times on the 20th, 2 times on the 21st and 2 calls and an email on the 22nd. I finally emailed my agency to tell her to stop calling my cell, my home and emailing me. I knew it was time to get very serious about retaining an attorney.