This is a repost. I am not the original author (see disclaimer at the bottom).
I am NOT OP. Original post by u/accountnumber496 in r/legaladvice
trigger warning:
show spoiler
child abuse
mood spoiler:
show spoiler
infuriating
My ex husband and his new wife made my daughter a back brace out of wood and steel and forced her to wear it. - 13 March 2016
My daughter is nine and we share custody by alternating weeks. My daughter says her back hurts now and her arm is tingling. I have a doctors appointment for her on Monday and in the meantime I am trying to remain calm.
I confronted my ex-husband about it and all her would say was one text message where he says his new wife didn’t like how my daughter slouched at the dinner table. They aren’t doctors and there is nothing wrong with her that she needs a brace. I fucking want to kill both of them. Is there a way I can get a quick court date or see a judge because I don’t want her going back there. When we divorced it took a long time to figure out custody.
Edit: Sorry the location is the state of Florida. I’m so mad I’m having a hard time focusing.
Update: My ex husband and his new wife made my daughter a back brace out of wood and steel and forced her to wear it (Florida) - 12 August 2016
Firstly I would like to thank everyone for all the support in my first post and all the supportive PM’s I received. It was really overwhelming (in a good way). A few people asked for an update so here it is.
So a lot has happened since I first posted. I called in to work while I was trying to get all this sorted. One of my co-workers has a cousin who is a lawyer and she knew someone who was able to help me and file the paperwork. My husband played dumb in court but his visits got reduced to supervised and he was ordered to take a parenting class.
My daughter went to physiotherapy. Eventually the court reinstated his visitation when he swore he had learned his lesson and was sorry and with his otherwise clean record the court agreed. I was against it but the court ruled against me.
I gave my daughter her own cell phone so she could call me whenever she needed to. On her second visit it happened again. This time the brace had steel and fabric instead of wood and they took her phone too. The next night she left when they weren’t looking and went up the street to a neighbor who is a police officer. The neighbor called paramedics and her co-workers. They had to cut the brace off my daughter.
My husband and his wife were arrested. They got out quickly but they have been charged and their infant is with CPS. My ex lost visitation and custody and I’m working on making it permanent.
Unfortunately my daughter’s shoulder was dislocated from the brace. It set back her rehab and part of her arm is still numb and tingling. She needed surgery and is still recovering. She always played sports (especially at school) and did dance but the doctor thinks she won’t ever be able to lift her arm all the way up again.
I hate my ex and he’ll see her again over my fucking dead body. Right now I’m focusing on my daughter while my lawyer takes care of things. That’s my update.
Reminder - I am not the original poster.
Disclaimer
This is a repost from reddit. I really missed this sub so I decided to post some top articles from time to time until hopefully one day this community will be large enough to produce its own content.
Read the original here
This was in 2016, I wonder how they are now.
Probably still imaginary.
Could be. But worse things happen in reality.
I'm all about true crime podcasts, and you're not wrong.
However, the giveaway here is "they had to cut the brace off," especially with "they got out quickly" following quickly behind.
If such a thing required cutting off - a process that would be much more dangerous to the child than disassembling it - it would have had to be designed to be permanently installed without cutting. That means welded or padlocked as opposed to bolted or latched. Besides which, building such a thing in that way requires a serious amount of effort and planning. Not to mention this is right on the heels of having had repercussions for doing that exact thing. The steel and fabric one would have had to be designed and built before normal visitation was resumed.
All that indicates an incredibly sick perpetrator, who also lied to a judge when he said he'd learned his lesson - because the thought and design and construction of the second one had to have already been going on. I find it unlikely that, in 2016, in Florida, someone who so grossly abuses a nine year old, and who is found out by their neighbor, a police officer, when said nine year old shows up at the door with the thing needing to be cut off, would be quickly released on bail.
Edit: @Speculater rightly points out that a brace, worn for such a short amount of time, could not dislocate a shoulder.
Rage-inducing stories on reddit are famously fake, and this is one of them.
Also if they had alternating custody what was the plan exactly when custody switched? Especially given that they already got prosecuted for the first time they did it…
Like it required planning and not planning at the same time
Oh let's talk about that.
It is amazingly uncommon for custody to be shared in that way. Moving house every week, back and forth, is incredibly stressful and disruptive for a child.
And then in the update, it's referring to how that "visitation" schedule was reinstated after the first incident. One, that's not visitation, that's true joint custody - a thing which is also rare in custody cases. Normally, you have one parent who has custody, and the other has visitation. Visitation usually means something like "every other weekend," so the non-custodial parent gets the child two days out of every fourteen. If it was true joint custody, the switchovers would be more like "every other weekend, and all summer," especially with an elementary school aged child.
That's not even addressing the fact that, in the story, the court just went back to that ridiculous arrangement after one parent was shown to have abused the child.