A woman from West Jordan, Utah, has been arrested in Croatia after she allegedly traveled with her four kids abroad without their fathers’ consent and failed to return home.
The Salt Lake County District Attorney’s Office confirmed that Elleshia Anne Seymour was taken into custody on Friday, January 16, in Dubrovnik, Croatia, according to FOX 13. The arrest took place after she was charged with four counts of Custodial Interference – Remove Child from State in December 2025.
Police said that Seymour, 35, took her four children — ages 11, 8, 7, and 3 years old — on a flight to Amsterdam in late November 2025 before they traveled to Croatia. After Seymour and the kids had been gone for weeks, officers determined that enough time had elapsed and she should have returned back to the United States with her kids, according to FOX 13.
Both of the men that she shares her kids with told police that they never agreed to allow her to take the children out of the country or state.
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Court documents stated that Seymour previously told her kids’ fathers that she was taking the kids because she believed that “end times” were near, according to ABC 4.
Meanwhile, her former boyfriend reportedly told police in December 2025 that Seymour “had recently discussed obtaining passports and leaving the country, expressing concerns about biblical events.”
Seymour’s arrest was confirmed after her ex, Kendall Seymour, whom she shares three of her kids with, explained on GoFundMe that the kids are “trapped in Croatia in a state-run orphanage.”
“We have to hire Croatian lawyers who specialize in child abduction, create and submit Hague Convention applications, hire court-approved translators, and extend our stay here by an unknown amount of time. All to work on getting the kids released from government custody,” he wrote in the Sunday, January 25, update.
Kendall added that there was a “fifth American child in this children’s home.” He said, “My children were traveling with him and his mother. The fifth child’s situation is even more difficult than my own kids’ status. We would like to help him as much as possible – his situation is going to need more legal help and strategy than ours.”
After Kendall confirmed that they had located the kids, the childrens’ grandfather told ABC 4 that he was “overjoyed” to find out where they were because the family “went a little over a month having no idea if they’re even alive anymore or if they were locked in a room somewhere.”
Before the kids were located, Kendall spoke to East Idaho News’ Courtroom Insider about the search. During the Sunday, January 4, interview, he explained that his kids’ babysitter informed him that they were missing.
“She was in a panic and just said, you know, ‘Your — Kenny, I think your kids are missing,’” he said at the time. “And at first, I thought she was just being, you know, a little paranoid, but the more she talked the more I was like, ‘This is, this is serious.’”
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Seymour reportedly left two notes behind before she fled the country, with one claiming she received a “delusional message from God” that said she would be “in Italy by Christmas.” The second note was a to-do list that involved discarding her phone and buying a prepaid burner phone.
“When we were married, there was nothing like this,” Kendall said of Seymour’s behavior. “We both grew up LDS, or Mormon, … but [there were] none of these beliefs about end times or Salt Lake specifically being destroyed.”
