Cuban American helped get his wife’s family out of Ukraine ‘between bombs and shots on the road’

Hamlet Garcia, a Cuban American faculty alternative advocate whose spouse is from Ukraine, opened up concerning the battle to get his spouse’s cousins to security amid Russia’s invasion.

The ladies and their youngsters escaped Ukraine via Poland and reached security in a rustic close to Poland, Garcia introduced on Twitter Sunday. The kids’s fathers remained in Ukraine to battle.

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“They’re my spouse’s cousins, ​​however they grew up in the identical home as sisters,” Garcia advised Fox Information Digital. “My spouse got here to the USA when she was 9 years outdated, however they by no means misplaced communication. My spouse and I’ve been married for 23 years and through all this time we all the time share with them through phone, letters, and with the arrival of video messages, we noticed them rising up, marrying, and having these lovely youngsters within the photographs”

“It was not simple in any respect to have the ability to get them out between bombs and pictures on the highway and to have the ability to take them to Poland and put them on that ship and take it to a safer neighboring nation,” Garcia added. “I don’t wish to give the identify of the nation, as a result of, as , Russian President Vladimir Putin has followers all around the world.”

Garcia shared a photograph of an house constructing within the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv the place Alisa Rogovenko, one in every of his spouse’s cousins, had an house. The constructing had been broken by Russian missiles. “She by no means lived in it, however she was about to maneuver in when the warfare began,” he stated.

“After the warfare began, they have been dwelling in a chilly basement with out heating, they usually heard missiles flying over them,” Garcia added.

Garcia stated he didn’t journey to Ukraine himself, however he used a contact there to assist get the households to security. He advised Fox Information Digital that he’ll go to the households quickly within the secure nation.

Garcia gained nationwide notoriety after he pled responsible in Dec. 2016 to a abstract offense of knowingly and illegally enrolling his daughter in a college outdoors the varsity district by which they lived. He was ordered to pay greater than $10,000 in restitution. 

Garcia, 42, his spouse Olesia, 34, and Olesia’s father, Grigori Sofitchouk, 54, appeared earlier than a Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, courtroom on costs of theft of providers for sending their daughter to highschool within the county, once they have been residing in neighboring Philadelphia County.