Legal Question in Family Law in Texas
I made my husband leave in Oct/2004 and never filed divorce papers due to financial reasons. We have two children, now six and nine years old.
He hasn't paid anything toward the children and only sporadically visited with them over the last five years. He was in jail for some of the time due to drugs/violence. He has no home, no car, and has only been working for a few months now at Best Buy. He currently lives with a woman who has four children, her mother and sister. It's in a different county almost two hours away.
I allowed the kids to visit with him at his current residence and they were left alone with the other four children while all the adults went to work. They were also made to do age-inappropriate chores and belted as punishment. I stopped allowing them to go visit.
Now he's threatening to get custody of them from me. I doubt he could even afford the lawyer required to obtain custody but is it possible?
What are my rights in a situation like this? I want to file for divorce, get sole custody, and have him ordered to pay support.
1 Answer from Attorneys
You shouldn't worry about him getting custody of the children.
You have a couple of options:
1. File for divorce. This will involve you hiring a lawyer.
2. Go to the Attorney General and tell them that you want them to establish an order for Dad to pay child support. They won't do a divorce for you, but they WILL file a petition asking for an order for him to pay support (their code for it is "OPET"). This order will give Dad some court-ordered visitation with the children. The AG is slow and inefficient, but they're free.
After he's been paying child support for a while, THEN you can go hire a lawyer for the divorce.
To apply for the AG's services, start here:
https://childsupport.oag.state.tx.us/wps/portal/csi
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