Background
After the suspicious 2017 death of the children’s two-year-old half-sister, K.C., the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services removed the children from their parents’ home. In 2018, while the criminal investigation remained pending, the trial court entered an order naming the Department permanent managing conservator and the parents possessory conservators without terminating their parental rights.
Father was later convicted of recklessly causing injury to a child based on evidence that K.C. had suffered severe abuse and fatal blunt-force trauma. He received a sixty-year prison sentence. In 2025, the Department again sought termination. A jury found multiple statutory grounds for termination, including endangerment and Father’s conviction for an offense causing a child’s death or serious injury, and found that termination was in the children’s best interest. The trial court also found that circumstances had materially and substantially changed since the prior order.
Father appealed, challenging the sufficiency of the evidence supporting the trial court’s changed-circumstances finding and the jury’s endangerment findings. He did not challenge the jury’s finding based on his injury-to-a-child conviction.
The Court’s Holding
The Thirteenth Court of Appeals affirmed. It held that Father could challenge the changed-circumstances finding for the first time on appeal because the trial court, rather than the jury, made that finding. By contrast, Father failed to preserve his challenges to the jury’s endangerment findings because he did not raise them through an instructed-verdict motion, an objection to submission, an appropriate post-verdict motion, or a motion for new trial.
The court rejected Father’s argument that Texas Supreme Court precedent required review of the unpreserved endangerment challenges. Although appellate courts must review challenged endangerment findings because of their collateral consequences, that requirement does not dispense with the ordinary preservation rules applicable after a jury trial.
The court did not decide whether the evidence adequately established a material and substantial change under Texas Family Code § 161.004. Any error was harmless because the unchallenged finding under § 161.001(b)(1)(L)—based on Father’s post-2018 conviction for injury to a child—independently supported termination, along with the jury’s unchallenged best-interest finding.
Key Takeaways
- A parent generally must preserve legal- and factual-sufficiency challenges to a jury’s termination findings in the trial court.
- The mandatory appellate review associated with endangerment findings does not excuse a failure to preserve a challenge following a jury trial.
- A post-denial statutory ground under § 161.001 can independently support termination, making alleged error under § 161.004 harmless when that independent ground is unchallenged.
Why It Matters
The opinion underscores the procedural distinction between findings made by a jury and findings made by a trial court. In parental-rights cases tried to a jury, counsel must use the appropriate trial or post-trial mechanism to preserve sufficiency challenges, including challenges to endangerment findings carrying collateral consequences.
It also confirms that a prior order denying termination does not require every later termination to proceed exclusively under the changed-circumstances framework of § 161.004. Conduct or qualifying events occurring after the prior order may support termination independently under § 161.001.