A 41-year-old French mother and her 55-year-old partner were arrested at a café terrace in Portugal after allegedly driving their two young sons hundreds of miles from home, blindfolding them, and leaving them alone in a wooded area near the country's southern coast.
The boys, aged five and four, were found Tuesday evening around 7 p.m., wandering a rural road between the Portuguese towns of Alcácer do Sal and Comporta. They were crying, terrified, and calling for their father. They carried backpacks with a change of clothes, two pieces of fruit, and two bottles of water. That was all their parents left them.
Portuguese police announced Thursday that they had arrested a man and woman "linked to the incident involving two minor children found alone near a public road in the municipality of Alcácer do Sal." The suspects, identified as Marine R, a sexologist from Colmar in eastern France, and her partner Marc B, face suspicion of abuse, endangering others, and abandonment. French prosecutors are now opening a separate child neglect case.
Surveillance footage aired by Portuguese broadcaster TVI showed the couple and the two boys at a petrol station in Miranda do Douro, a town near the Spanish border, at 6:16 p.m. on May 11. Marc appears to be driving a grey car. Marine is seen getting out and walking over to an attendant. The boys are visible in the vehicle, unaware, as the Daily Mail reported, of what awaited them.
The family had entered Portugal that same day via Bragança on the Spanish border. From there, they traveled more than 310 miles, first to the Miranda do Corvo region and then further south to Alcácer do Sal. They stayed at a hotel in town, roughly 12 miles from the spot where the boys would later be found alone.
A local couple, Eugenia and Artur Quintas, discovered the boys on the rural road. Artur Quintas described the scene plainly.
"They were crying, they were terrified. They were crying and calling for their father."
He said the older boy told him that he and his brother had gotten lost in the forest and that their parents had left without them. But Quintas knew right away what had happened.
"I realised right away that they had been abandoned by the backpacks. When I saw the way the backpacks were packed, I knew they had been abandoned."
The Quintases took the children home and called police. Officers transported the boys to Setúbal Hospital, where they received a full health assessment and were given a clean bill of health. They were then placed into foster care. Information from the French embassy in Portugal confirmed the boys had no blood relatives in the country.
Authorities were eventually able to determine that the children had come from France. The case of a baby girl found abandoned in an overturned stroller in Times Square reminded Americans that child abandonment is not confined to any one country. But the details here carry a particularly chilling dimension.
The boys told authorities that their parents blindfolded them, led them into a wooded area, and told them they were playing a game to "drive away the devil." The children said they were told they could remove the blindfolds only after finding a buried knife and using it to cut the coverings off. They had been left with nothing else, no phone, no adult, no way to call for help.
Daytime temperatures in that part of Portugal can reach up to 30 degrees Celsius, roughly 86 degrees Fahrenheit, at this time of year. The boys, alone and disoriented, managed to find their way to the road before the Quintases spotted them.
No confirmed motive has been established. Colmar prosecutor Jean Richert, commenting on the boys' biological father's reaction, said simply: "He's like everyone else, he doesn't understand."
Marine R had disappeared with the two children roughly two weeks before they were found in Portugal. Her own mother reported the disappearance to police, telling them the children had been abducted by their mother. The boys' biological father, who had been granted only "limited and supervised visitation rights", filed a separate child abduction report.
French police were already aware of the stepfather, Marc B, who is believed to suffer from a psychiatric disorder. Yet somehow, the couple managed to drive from eastern France, cross through Spain, enter Portugal, and travel hundreds of miles across the country before abandoning the children and settling into a café in Fátima, 124 miles north of Alcácer do Sal, where they were finally arrested.
Marine was later seen in a Portuguese police station, apparently in handcuffs. French authorities are now working to process the boys' return to France. The questions of how the system lost track of two small children, and whether the warnings filed by their grandmother and father were acted on with any urgency, remain unanswered.
Marine R's background only deepens the dissonance. Born in 1984, she graduated in psychomotor therapy from the Pierre and Marie Curie University of Paris in 2008. She worked in the city of Troyes for a decade before studying sexology at Paris Diderot University between 2019 and 2022. She left Troyes in 2025 to settle in Colmar.
Her LinkedIn profile described her work "in body-based practices, developmental dynamics, and specific trauma care," offering consultations across France, Germany, Belgium, and Switzerland. She advertised: "I help women and men achieve sexual fulfilment. At your own pace, even if you're traumatised."
On Facebook, Marine promoted a masterclass on what she called the "co-construction of sexuality", aimed, she wrote, at "parents, grandparents, uncles and aunts, for every member in families, for anyone who would like to pass on something about sexuality, whether to children, adolescents or young people, while respecting their sensitivity and level of development." The question of how parental duties intersect with ideology and institutional oversight has drawn attention in other contexts as well, including a recent Supreme Court ruling that blocked a California law hiding children's gender transitions from families.
Marine had obtained custody of the two boys following her separation from their biological father. She reportedly had no images or videos of her children on her Facebook page.
Psychologist Melanie Tavares, speaking to CNN Portugal, laid out what the boys now face.
"It's the feeling of abandonment, of being lost, unprotected, of not having familiar resources to ultimately soothe the fear."
Tavares warned of symptoms including severe difficulty sleeping, disrupted eating routines, irritability, isolation, and trouble accepting the unfamiliar foster care environment. She did not soften the prognosis.
"This is a trauma that will remain, just like when we get a tattoo. It stays for life."
Those words land hard. Two boys, four and five years old, blindfolded and told to find a buried knife in a forest, now carry a wound no hospital can treat. The adults responsible for protecting them are the ones who inflicted it. Cases involving disturbing conduct near children's spaces in Europe have raised broader concerns about whether legal systems on the continent respond with sufficient seriousness.
Marine R and Marc B remain in Portuguese custody on suspicion of abuse, endangering others, and abandonment. French prosecutors are pursuing a parallel child neglect case. The boys are in foster care, awaiting return to France, a country where their grandmother and father both tried to sound the alarm before any of this happened.
The investigation will have to answer how a mother with custody, a stepfather already known to police for psychiatric issues, and two small children vanished from France for roughly two weeks without anyone stopping them. It will have to account for the gap between the abduction reports filed and the eventual arrest at a café terrace in Fátima. And it will have to reckon with what the boys described, a ritual-like game, blindfolds, a buried knife, and the instruction to "drive away the devil." The debate over how governments balance family policy with the protection of children is not abstract. It plays out in cases exactly like this one.
No confirmed motive has been offered. No explanation has surfaced that makes sense of what was done to those two boys. The system had warnings. It had reports. It had time. And two children still ended up blindfolded and alone in a foreign forest, calling for a father who wasn't there.
When the people charged with protecting children are the ones who abandon them, the failure isn't just personal. It's institutional, and the children pay for it forever.
