The New York Times printed an article on September 2, 2009 bringing light to an often unrecognized wartime stress on military families:  custody battles during and after service abroad. 

The article focused on Leydi Mendoza, a specialist with the New Jersey National Guard who returned from fighting in Iraq to confront a custody battle with the father of her two-year-old daughter. 

Mendoza and the child’s father had established a written family care plan with military officials that provided for shared custody when she returned from service in Iraq.  Upon her return, however, the father demanded full custody of their daughter, claiming that it was too disruptive for their daughter to spend more than a few hours with a mother she did not know.  After a three month battle, the Family Court judge granted temporary residential custody to the father but permitted daily visits and weekly sleepovers to Mendoza. 

In a similar New York case, when Tanya Towne’s National Guard unit was deployed to Irag in 2004, a family court judge granted temporary of her son to the father.  Towne and the child’s father were divorced and Towne had had primary custody of the child.  Before Towne returned home from service, the father sought permanent custody of the child.  Family Court granted that request and Towne appealed.  The Appellate Division affirmed the Family Court’s ruling.  Though calling her an excellent mother, the judges determined that the deployment and other changes in Towne’s life, including the breakup of her second marriage, contributed toward an unstable home life.

A 2008 New York statute does provide some protection for military parents in custody cases.  The statute requires that custody cases be delayed for at least 90 days during a parent’s overseas deployment and attorneys must be appointed to represent military parents.  However, there is still no protection against a change in custody based upon military service.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 20th, 2010 at 8:00 am and is filed under Custody and Visitation, Divorce News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.