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The Eagle County family of Tina Medina is speaking out to tell its side of the story after the U.S. Marshals’ office said she fled California with her child and was hiding out in Gypsum.

A June 20 release from the U.S. Marshals office was intended to notify the press that Tina Medina, 43, was arrested June 17 at the Gypsum home of her parents, David and Maxine Medina, and her 10-year-old child was taken into protective custody. That much is not being disputed by Medina’s family, said Medina’s sister, Kristen Medina.

But the release also said that Tina Medina fled California with the child after learning that the child’s father had been awarded full custody, that the child went missing from San Diego in December, and Tina Medina had been “taking steps to mislead or throw off law enforcement to where they were residing.”

Kristen Medina says those details aren’t true.

“My niece has lived in Eagle County since she was an infant,” Kristen Medina said. “She was definitely not in California in December.”

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Kristen Medina said her sister is a well-known local in Gypsum who ran for mayor a few years ago, and Tina Medina’s daughter frequently participates in community events and attended elementary school in Eagle County.

“We were never in hiding,” Kristen Medina said.

Kristen Medina says the only document her family has from the California Superior Court shows that the court awarded Tina Medina primary physical custody of the child in 2017 and permitted her to move the child to Colorado.

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Since then, the child has been making visits to California, and the child’s father has been making visits to Colorado, but Kristen Medina said the child was not in California in December, despite the U.S. Marshals saying she had been “missing from San Diego since December 2024.”

A U.S. Marshal’s office spokesperson, in a phone call on Friday, said a missing child report was filed in California in December, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the child was in California at the time.

“On August 1, 2024, the court ordered that the father, Jacob Aguirre, had sole legal and physical custody, and that the minor child be returned to his custody in San Diego,” the spokesperson said.

Kristen Medina also said her sister was not aware of any change in the child custody agreement, despite the U.S. Marshals saying “Medina had been in a custody dispute with the child’s father before courts in California awarded him sole custody. Soon after, Medina fled California with the child and was suspected to be residing with her parents in Colorado.”

“That was 100 percent not right,” Kristen Medina said.

Kristen Medina said the only custody dispute Tina Medina was aware of was initiated following an April 2024 incident in which the Glenwood Springs Police Department responded to a report of alleged child abuse involving Aguirre and a different child, with an audio recording of alleged physical abuse taking place.

“You can hear a younger male voice say, ‘Ow’ multiple times and then ‘Ow, that hurt’ and then exclaims ‘You hurt me,'” according to the Glenwood Police officer’s report. “I reviewed the child abuse statutes and audio multiple times with my sergeant and there was not enough evidence to pursue further investigation.”

Kristen Medina said it was the latest in a series of physical abuse allegations, and she has documentation of the child, in a forensic interview requested by the Garfield County Department of Human Services in 2019, indicating that her father choked her.

“Given that (the child’s) disclosure was not detailed enough to cause any safety plan to be implemented, it is believed that attending therapy would be the best intervention to avert the potential for future trauma,” according to the documentation.

Kristen Medina said Tina Medina stopped taking her daughter to California for court-ordered visitation with her father following the 2024 incident, which could be how the claim that the child was missing from California may have originated.

The U.S. Marshals office said they’re not sure if Medina was in court in California in August when the change in custody occurred.

“Aug. 1 is when the custody order was issued, and she obviously failed to comply and did not turn over custody at the direction of the court, and they filed a criminal charge against her, and then that warrant was issued in December,” the spokesperson said. “From August to December, it sounds like they probably gave her some reasonable amount of time and chances to try to comply with this order before they pursued the criminal charge, and she did not do that.”

The U.S. Marshals office said Tina Medina had taken her daughter out of school at Stone Creek Elementary, something that is not disputed by the Medina family. But the U.S. Marshals offices’ insistence that the decision to take the child out of school was made to throw off law enforcement as to her whereabouts is being disputed by the family.

“Me and my niece went to the pool on opening day in Eagle,” Kristen Medina said. “We weren’t in hiding.”

A U.S. Marshals office spokesperson said the child was enrolled in an “online course, with incorrect addresses and different things, all kinds of stuff to deceive her whereabouts.”

The San Diego Superior Court issued a warrant for Tina Medina for parental kidnapping on Dec. 23, with a bond set at $1 million.

Tina Medina has been charged as a fugitive of justice for out-of-state kidnapping and is booked at the Eagle County jail. The family is currently trying to find an attorney to fight the charges.

“Right now, we’re just trying to stay strong as a family,” Kristen Medina said.