I know nothing about child custody and how those court proceedings work. Please help?
By admin on Aug 22, 2008 in Law & Ethics
My fiancé and I are saving up money to hire an attorney to attempt to gain full custody of his 8 year old son from a previous marriage. I love my fiancé and his son, we also have a baby on the way in August and I know the best situation for his son would be to live with us. His ex wife screwed up his credit and somehow got full custody of their son while he was away in the coast guard. They were supposed to get joint custody and he signed some papers before he left, but somehow she got full custody and now he only gets his son every other weekend.
His ex wife is a stripper now, parties a lot, does drugs and is very selfish. She has no interest in spending time with her son or teaching him anything and has even hit him in the past, but wants custody because of the child support she gets (which I’m sure is not spent on her son because we have to buy him everything and spend what little precious time we have with him helping him in school because he’s falling behind, instead of getting to spend quality time doing fun things with him.) Their son doesn’t even live with the ex wife; he lives with her sister and mother. She refuses to stay in contact with my fiancé, we never know where she is and she even tried to move to another state a while back without telling anyone.
I want to know what I need to be doing now in order to have a solid case against his ex and prove she’s an unfit mother when we take her to court. I recently found out that she has not even been claiming the child support she’s been receiving for like 6 months in order to continue to get welfare benefits. His son needs to finish his childhood years in a healthy environment with loving parents and I’m worried that we might not win the case because I know his ex will fight it just because she doesn’t care about anyone other than herself and is a child. Her sister, which is taking care of their son now, is a good person and doesn’t even like her sister so I think she might testify for us in court and I think she’d agree that it would be best for the son to be living with us. We haven’t talked to her about this yet because I don’t want it to get back to the ex wife what we’re planning until we can actually afford to make it happen.
Phil R | Aug 23, 2008 | Reply
Well, first of all, I congratulate you on realizing that you need an experienced attorney, specifically an attorney who deals with a great deal of family law matters.
The most important thing you can do right now is to keep a diary of what’s going on. In other words, whenever you have to spend money to buy the child clothes, make a note of it. If the child comes over dirty, take a note of it.
The family law attorney can advise what are the criteria for switching custody of the child in your state. Provide the attorney with the evidence you have, and let him/her sort out the relevant parts. Don’t hold anything back, but do NOT fabricate evidence either. That hurts you more than it can possibly help.
Making sure you get copies of his school records, etc and talk to his teachers to see what their observations are of him in school. In other words.. is he sleeping in class, acting out, etc? These might be signs of problems at home, although if he is no longer living with his mother then that’s a different issue.
Your state’s welfare department would probably be very interested to learn of the child’s living arrangement, since it appears the child’s mother *may* be committing welfare fraud. However, I wouldn’t turn her in until after the proceeding to transfer custody. Hang in there, and find an attorney who will listen to you and work with you.
For a referral, contact your local or state bar association.