Legal Question in Civil Litigation in North Carolina

I just discovered that the mother of my 14 year old son's girlfriend has been sneaking him to her house (when the GF is there as far as we know) when he was supposed to be other places, lying directly to our faces about many thing (one time in an attempt to trick us into letting him spending the night at their house), and has text with him approximate 3000 times in the last 3 months. I have the last couple of days content and they are disturbing ("I need a hisname fix.", making plans for him to sneak out of the house and ride his bike to their house at 6am along 8 miles of busy streets to eat lunch with her and the girlfriend... but only after her husband leaves for work, picking him up for 1.5 hour lunch with just the two of them on school holidays without telling me or his mother, etc). How difficult is it to get the content of the rest of the 3000 text messages? It seems like in this situation, it should be doable.

It does seem to me that the vast majority of the contact and the secret visits were to see the girlfriend and the mom was just encouraging (and participating in) the lying and facilitating the sneaking by picking him up. The one exception that I know of for that is when she ate lunch alone with him two days ago. So, while I don't disagree that maybe police involvement is a possible path, I was hoping to make sure first by reading the rest of the texts.

I apologize for posting twice, but I needed to make something more clear and I didn't see a way to edit my original post or post my own reply.


Asked on 11/14/12, 7:44 am

1 Answer from Attorneys
James DeMay Ferguson, Scarbrough & Hayes, P.A.

It is nearly impossible to get text messages even with a subpoena, and without a pending court action I don't see any way that you can do it. I've been told that text messages are only kept by the phone provider for 48 hours, and the only way to extend this period is with a court order.

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Answered on 11/14/12, 8:59 am


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