Legal Question in Family Law in Ohio
I'm from Ohio. My boyfriend has a three year old daughter. He never married the mother of his daughter, but they were together up until the summer of 2010. Paternity has been established and he does pay child support. He was seeing his daughter as much as he wanted up until March of 2011. He's ex married another man and she began denying him time with his daughter. A couple weeks later he discovered that his ex, her new husband, and his daughter have moved out of state and no one would tell him where. All the while he was still attempting to see his daughter to no avail. His ex changed her number and her family refused to speak to him. A month later he finally hears from his ex and she demanded that he sign away his rights as his daughter's father so her husband could adopt her. My boyfriend, of course, refused, demanded to know where his daughter was, but of course he never heard back from her. He currently does not have the money for a lawyer, but is saving up and still attempts to contact his ex. We recently found out that his ex and daughter have moved to Hawaii -- her husband is in the military and is stationed there. He is terrified that if he does go to court that the court will not grant him visitation, because its been almost a year and he has not tried to go to court, because of money. I'm sorry for the lengthiness of this, but what I am asking is, what are the chances once he is able to file for visitation that he will receive it??
1 Answer from Attorneys
In Ohio, when two people are not married and the father wants a judicial determination of paternity and the setting up of visitation, then he needs to go to the juvenile court and file a complaint to establish paternity and set up visitation.
One issue that you might encounter though is that after a certain period of time, the case may need to be domesticated out to where the child is (Hawaii) and that would entail even greater expense.
There are alternatives to paying private attorneys to litigate for you. There may be a Legal Aid Society in your area, or if there is a law school near you, many times a law school will have a legal clinic in which the professors superivise the third year law students in bringing actions on behalf of those who cannot normally afford it. You might want to look into this, and sooner rather than later.
A court is always going to grant visitation rights to a parent and will not strip a parent of his rights unless the other parent can show abandonment. Here I don't think it would be easy to show abandonment given the fact that the mother removed the child from the continental United States and the father only recently found out her location. Further, a year of not seeing the child may require superivsed visitation at first (since he will be something of a stranger at first to the child) but I don't think there could be a finding of abandonment over such a short time.
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