Background
Brandon M. and Alexandria B. divorced in 2017 after sharing an equal parenting schedule of their two children, Beau and Aycen. In February 2024, following criminal charges against Father’s new wife for sex trafficking, Father agreed to place the children with Mother under an immediate protection agreement. Mother filed for emergency custody on February 12, 2024, initially with no visitation for Father. On April 9, 2024, the trial court limited Father to four hours per week of supervised visitation at a facility called Blended Recovery.
Father objected to the supervised visitation arrangement and refused to visit at the facility, citing personal objections and work obligations. He maintained regular telephone contact with the children instead. Father represented to the court that he was working on a motion to modify the visitation order and was awaiting a July 9 re-hearing. On the day of that scheduled hearing, Mother and her new husband filed a petition to terminate Father’s parental rights, alleging abandonment by failure to visit.
The trial court found by clear and convincing evidence that Father had willfully abandoned the children by failing to visit them for four consecutive months, and terminated his parental rights. Father appealed.
The Court’s Holding
The Tennessee Court of Appeals reversed the trial court’s termination judgment. The relevant four-month period for measuring abandonment ran from March 9, 2024 through July 8, 2024. The appellate court found that Father’s legal visitation rights were not formally established until May 2, 2024—two months into this period. Prior to that date, his access had been cut off entirely following the emergency custody order, then restored only in the restrictive form of supervised visitation.
The court held that the evidence failed to establish clear and convincing evidence of willful abandonment. Under Tennessee law, a parent who is thwarted by circumstances beyond his control has not willfully abandoned his child. Here, Father visited the children multiple times before the emergency custody order, was given only a supervised visitation option he found objectionable, and was actively pursuing legal remedies through the court system to restore his parental access. The fact that Father maintained telephone contact with the children and was present at the courthouse awaiting a re-hearing when the termination petition was filed weighed against a finding of willful abandonment.
Because the statutory ground for termination failed, the court did not address whether termination was in the best interest of the children.
Key Takeaways
- A parent cannot be found to have willfully abandoned a child merely by refusing supervised visitation options if the parent is actively pursuing legal remedies to restore full parental access.
- The statutory four-month period for measuring abandonment begins only when the parent’s legal visitation rights are formally established—not when temporary custody orders first restrict access.
- Maintenance of telephone contact between parent and child can factor into whether visitation refusal amounts to willful abandonment.
- Termination of parental rights requires clear and convincing evidence and is subject to searching appellate review independent of the trial court’s credibility assessments regarding the sufficiency of evidence.
Why It Matters
This decision reinforces the fundamental nature of parental rights in Tennessee jurisprudence and protects against termination based on technical violations when a parent’s underlying intent to maintain the relationship remains clear. The opinion establishes that courts must distinguish between a parent’s refusal of inadequate visitation alternatives and actual abandonment, particularly where the parent is simultaneously exercising legal remedies and maintaining non-visitation contact with the child.
For practitioners, the case is significant because it requires fact-intensive analysis of whether visitation restrictions imposed by the court were reasonable or whether the parent had viable alternative means of seeking restoration of parental access. The decision emphasizes that the heightened clear and convincing evidence standard in termination cases must be rigorously applied by appellate courts, which conduct independent review of whether the evidence truly eliminates serious or substantial doubt regarding the alleged ground for termination.