"I said, 'Swear to me that you're going to bring this boy back to me,'" she said. "He said, 'Anna, of course I'm going to bring him back.' "

Investigators say he did not do that.

A federal grand jury in Atlanta has indicted Sims' husband, 56-year-old Lawrenceville physician Fayette A. Sims III, on charges of international parental kidnapping. The rarely prosecuted offense alleges that Sims has kept the child out of the United States without the consent of his wife, a 29-year-old native of Ukraine. She has spent the last year pleading with her husband and the authorities for her son's return.

"I had the feeling no one would do this to the mother," she said through tears.

Her ordeal casts light onto the vexing problem of international parental abduction, where one parent takes a child out of the United States without the other parent's permission. The U.S. State Department says it tracks 1,100 cases at any given time but never hears about many others.

The department, which has a unit that focuses on cases of international parental abduction, says left-behind parents often face an uphill battle in securing the return of abducted children. The reasons include government bureaucracies that crawl at a glacial pace and family laws that vary from country to country.

"It can be very tricky," said Stuart Patt, spokesman for the State Department. "We are very often in a difficult position."

About 60 countries have signed a treaty governing the return of abducted children — Costa Rica has not, Patt said.

Figures from the State Department, compiled last May, show that Mexico had the most open abduction cases (154) followed by Germany, Jordan, Japan and Egypt, with from 33 to 41 each. The figures list 17 cases involving U.S. citizen children taken to Costa Rica without one parent's permission.

Anna Sims said she welcomed her husband's indictment in U.S. District Court in Atlanta on Dec. 16, after an FBI investigation, because nothing else seemed to be getting her any closer to being reunited with her son.

Dr. Sims could not be reached for comment after several attempts, including at his home in Costa Rica.

His mother and sister in metro Atlanta declined to talk about the case. An Atlanta attorney who has represented him in a divorce hearing, C. Wilbur Warner Jr., said he does not represent Sims on the kidnapping charge and so could not comment on it. An acquaintance, Garnett Lance, said Sims kept pictures of his son on his office walls.

"It was well known that he loved the kid," Lance said.

He said he has spoken with Sims by phone since the doctor moved to Costa Rica and that they made small talk.

"I can't know what goes through a man's head, but there are two sides to every story," he said.

A typical international abduction case involves a divorced or separated parent spiriting a child out of the United States to a country where he or she has citizenship. Some abducting parents hold citizenship in the United States and another country. Others are legal immigrants to the United States with citizenship in their native countries, though U.S. citizens also abduct children.

Last year a Gwinnett County mother was discovered living in the Cayman Islands with her two children. She had taken them out of the country in violation of a custody order.

'Hoping it would work out'

Authorities prefer that international-abduction cases be resolved out of court, ideally through discussions between the parents.

Failing that, the State Department says, left-behind parents can ask for help in the court system of the abducting parent's country, though that can be a lengthy, expensive and often fruitless process because U.S. laws and court orders are not automatically recognized abroad.

The International Parental Kidnapping Act of 1993 made it a federal crime for one parent to remove a child from this country and keep the child abroad "with the intent to obstruct the lawful exercise of parental rights," but authorities warn that prosecutions may make an abducted child's return less likely. The reason: Abducting parents are unlikely to return to the United States if they will face criminal charges.

Sims came to the United States from her native Ukraine after signing up in her early 20s with an online matchmaking service that pairs women in that country with men in the United States looking for a wife. She said she exchanged letters and phone calls with Fayette Sims and accepted a marriage proposal he offered during a visit to Ukraine.

She arrived in metro Atlanta in April 1998 with a son from a previous marriage and settled into her new life as a doctor's wife. Nine months later, she gave birth to a baby boy. She and her husband named him Fayette A. Sims IV but came to call him by a nickname, Mula.

The marriage had its share of problems.

Sims said her husband told her she didn't need a Social Security card and frowned on her plans to learn English as a prelude to a decent job. When her mother came for a visit and the family went to Disney World, she said, she drove to Orlando with her mom and two sons while her husband chose to fly there separately.

"I understood then that it was not what I wanted but I was hoping it would work out because we had a child together," she said.

She said her husband started talking about moving out of the United States after he inherited a share of a family business and sold it for $3 million.

"One day he was like, 'Let's go to Costa Rica,' " she said.

The family made several trips to that country in 2002, and Fayette Sims eventually bought a house there, his wife said.

About two weeks after her husband and son left for what was supposed to be a two-month trip to Costa Rica, Sims said, her husband called from Central America.

"He said, 'We're not coming back. Costa Rica is now the place for Mula to live.' "

Sims traveled to Costa Rica twice after that call, visiting her estranged husband and Mula. She said she wanted to take the boy back to the United States but that her husband hid the boy's passport.

For the first few months that Mula was gone, Sims said she talked to him by phone, telling him that she missed him but staying away from the ugly details.

She said she last spoke with her son on Jan. 25, shortly before a custody hearing in metro Atlanta in which it became obvious that a federal grand jury had indicted her husband.

She missed her son's fifth birthday and Christmas. She yearns for a bedtime ritual they shared — she read him a Russian children's book every night about a baby cow that finds a lottery ticket.

"It's unbelievably hard," Sims said. "I try not to think about it, but when I do, it breaks my heart."

She sobbed quietly talking about how she has tried to be strong for her other son, Mark, now 8, who misses his little brother.

Sims has filed for divorce and won a court order granting her temporary custody of Mula, said Bob Marshall, her attorney. She tries to maintain a routine, working in a day spa, even as she waits for a phone call that U.S. officials say could come at any day — a notice to board a plane for Central America to go pick up her son.

"I'm the mother," she said. "I'm not going to lose hope."