Background
The West Virginia Department of Human Services filed a child abuse and neglect petition in June 2024 concerning F.L., a young child, alleging that domestic violence between the parents exposed the child to a risk of substantial emotional harm, and that both parents’ reported substance abuse impaired their parenting to a degree posing an imminent risk to the child’s health and safety. The petition also alleged that the father, M.L., who lived out of state and visited the child in West Virginia, had failed to protect F.L. from the mother’s drug use and was unwilling to cooperate with an in-home safety plan. The mother had obtained a domestic violence protective order (DVPO) against the father around the same time.
At the adjudicatory hearing in March 2025, the mother testified to a pattern of volatile behavior by the father, including yelling and name-calling in the child’s presence, throwing a cup of liquid at her, spitting in her face, refusing to leave her home, and threatening to burn the house down if she called police. The mother’s aunt and maternal grandmother corroborated the contentious nature of the relationship. The father denied the domestic violence allegations, testified that the mother had offered him drugs during his March 2024 visit, and noted that he had tested negative on a drug screen taken before the hearing. The paternal grandmother offered testimony supporting the father’s account of the visit.
The circuit court found the father’s denial of any domestic violence not credible, adjudicated him as an abusing parent and F.L. as an abused and neglected child, and subsequently terminated his parental rights at a dispositional hearing in June 2025. The mother, by contrast, successfully completed an improvement period and was reunited with F.L. The father appealed, challenging the evidentiary rulings at adjudication and the finding that he was an abusing parent.
The Court’s Holding
The Supreme Court of Appeals affirmed the circuit court’s order in a unanimous memorandum decision. On the evidentiary challenges, the court held that the circuit court did not abuse its discretion in excluding text messages between the mother and the paternal grandmother as irrelevant to whether domestic violence occurred between the parents, and in declining to permit additional cross-examination regarding purported inconsistencies between the mother’s hearing testimony and her prior statements in the domestic violence proceedings — particularly because those documents were already admitted into evidence and available to the court as factfinder.
On the merits, the court rejected the father’s argument that the conduct proven did not constitute domestic violence or could not support an abuse and neglect adjudication. Applying West Virginia Code § 49-1-201 and § 48-27-202, the court held that the evidence of repeated harassment, psychological abuse, and threatening acts — including the threat to burn down the home — satisfied the statutory definition of domestic violence, and that the circuit court, as credibility arbiter, was entitled to disbelieve the father’s denials. The court also declined to disturb the circuit court’s findings on substance use and failure to protect, noting that although the father claimed the mother had offered him drugs, he nonetheless left F.L. in her care, did not seek custody when he filed his own domestic violence petition, and did not contest the DVPO granting the mother temporary custody.
The court further clarified that its prior decision in In re Lilith H., 231 W. Va. 170, 744 S.E.2d 280 (2013), does not stand for the broad proposition that a single incident of domestic violence can never support an abuse and neglect adjudication; rather, that case addressed an “unexpected and isolated” altercation that was too attenuated from the type of household domestic violence from which such an adjudication may derive.
Key Takeaways
- Under West Virginia law, domestic violence as defined in § 48-27-202 — including harassment, psychological abuse, and threatening acts occurring even once between co-parents — can support a finding that a child is abused and that the offending parent is an abusing parent under § 49-1-201.
- A circuit court sitting as factfinder in abuse and neglect proceedings has broad discretion over evidentiary rulings, including the exclusion of text messages and limitation of cross-examination, when the excluded evidence lacks sufficient relevance to the central disputed issue.
- A parent’s failure to seek custody of a child — even after learning of the other parent’s active drug use and filing a domestic violence petition — can support a circuit court’s adjudicatory finding that the parent failed to protect the child, regardless of the parent’s own negative drug test.
- In re Lilith H. does not categorically bar abuse and neglect adjudications based on a single domestic violence incident; its holding was narrow and fact-specific, limited to an isolated, unexpected altercation between third parties in the household.
Why It Matters
This decision reinforces that West Virginia courts will construe the domestic violence provisions of the abuse and neglect statutes broadly to protect children from the harmful effects of inter-parental violence, even where the abusive parent does not reside in the home. Attorneys representing parents in abuse and neglect proceedings should be aware that a pattern of threatening, harassing, or psychologically abusive conduct in a child’s presence — even without physical injury to the child — can independently sustain an adjudication of abuse and support termination of parental rights.
The decision also signals that appellate courts will give substantial deference to circuit court credibility determinations and evidentiary rulings in these cases, making the adjudicatory hearing the critical battleground. Counsel should ensure that all relevant impeachment evidence is squarely tied to the ultimate contested issue — here, whether domestic violence occurred — rather than to collateral matters, as tangential relevance arguments are unlikely to succeed on appeal.