Hold onto your hats, folks—former Oregon Democrat lawmaker Melissa Fireside has bolted from the country with her nine-year-old son, Benicio, dodging fraud charges that could land her in hot water, the Daily Mail reported.
This jaw-dropping saga unfolds as Fireside, once a Clackamas County Commissioner, allegedly scammed $30,000 from a vulnerable senior, fled her bail conditions, and whisked her son across borders to Europe, leaving her ex-boyfriend, Cody Bellamy, heartbroken and sounding the alarm.
Let’s rewind to the beginning of this mess, where Fireside’s troubles started brewing with accusations of financial deceit.
She’s accused of fraudulently securing $30,000 in loans under the name of Arthur W. Petrone, her mother’s late boyfriend, who was in a senior care home and, per his daughter Lynn Roberts, far too frail to consent.
Arrested and facing trial, Fireside resigned from her commissioner post earlier this year, but apparently, sticking around for justice wasn’t on her agenda.
Instead, she pulled a vanishing act, yanking Benicio out of his school in Lexington, Oregon, last Wednesday without a word to anyone.
By Thursday, Fireside had slipped across the southern border, hopped a flight from Mexico to Amsterdam using an Austrian passport, and left her bail conditions in the dust.
That passport, by the way, grants her the ability to live and work anywhere in the EU—talk about a convenient escape hatch for someone with a laundry list of legal woes.
Meanwhile, Cody Bellamy, the 44-year-old father of Benicio now residing in Alger, Michigan, is left piecing together a nightmare, unable to legally claim this as abduction since Fireside holds full custody.
Bellamy, who met Fireside online in 2014 and welcomed their son in 2016 despite political differences, paints a grim picture of a manipulative past, alleging she used his credit to buy a $900,000 home in Lake Oswego when hers was nonexistent.
He claims their relationship ended abruptly six months after Benicio’s birth, and Fireside made co-parenting a legal battlefield, racking up $18,000 in expenses for Bellamy in a failed bid for joint custody.
“I almost feel like Melissa just used me as a surrogate,” Bellamy told reporters, his frustration palpable as he described feeling like nothing more than a means to her desperate desire for a child.
Adding insult to injury, Oregon social services still demand Bellamy pay child support, even as Fireside and Benicio are presumed to be hiding somewhere in Europe—talk about a system more focused on paperwork than people.
“I’m terrified that I will never see my son alive again,” Bellamy confessed through tears, grappling with the dread that Fireside might flee further, perhaps to the Middle East, to evade extradition.
While he insists she’s a good mother unlikely to harm Benicio, Bellamy warns that pressure can twist even the best intentions, leaving him to wonder what desperate moves she might make next under the weight of her choices.
