Sup. Ct.: Absentee TN Dad Can Sue When Mom Killed in Car Crash

Tennessee child support case summary on inheritance in family law.

Kenneth M. Spires v. Haley Reece Simpson

The mother and father in this Tennessee case were married, and had one son who was born in 2009.  About a month after the child was born, the father abandoned the mother and child.  He never returned to the marital home and never contributed to the financial support of the mother or child.  However, the parents were never divorced.

In 2010, the mother was killed in a traffic accident.  The maternal grandmother was awarded custody of the child.  The father then commenced a wrongful death lawsuit against the driver of the other vehicle.  He brought the suit in his individual capacity, and also as a representative of the mother and  child.

The grandmother sought to intervene in the wrongful death case, and to substitute herself as plaintiff.  She argued that the father was disqualified since he had abandoned his family.  About the same time, the child was adopted by the mother’s brother, and the father’s parental rights were terminated.

Eventually, the defendant agreed to settle the case for the policy limits of $100,000, and agreed to pay this amount to the court.  At the hearing, it was disclosed that there was never any formal child support order for the child, but the father had four other children and owed child support arrearages of over $100,000.

A Tennessee statute provides that a person who has unsatisfied child support arrearages is disqualified by prosecuting a wrongful death action.  The other parties in the case argued that the child should receive the entire $100,000.

The father argued that he was entitled to be the plaintiff, but the statute only prevented him from recovering the money until the child support was satisfied.

The trial court agreed with the other parties, and dismissed the father from the case.  The $100,000 was to be held in trust for the child.

The father appealed to the Tennessee Court of Appeals, and it reversed.  That court agreed that the statute did not preclude the father from bringing the case, it merely required that the child support obligations be satisfied first.  The court of appeals awarded half of the money to the father, but noted that all of the money would go to satisfy the child support obligations for the other children.  The wife’s brother then appealed to the Tennessee Supreme Court.

The high court first noted that, in general, the surviving spouse has the superior right to file the wrongful death case and control the litigation.  But it also noted that despite the control over the litigation, the statute makes the proceeds belong to the children, under the laws of intestate succession.

The father argued that the statute applied only if the parent sought to recover for the death of that child.  He argued that it did not apply if child support was owed to unrelated children.

After a close reading of the statute, the high court concluded that relations discussed in the statute were reference to how someone was related to the decedent.  For that reason, it concluded that the child support arrearage applied only if the arrearages were owed for the support of the decedent child.

To reinforce this holding, the court looked into the legislative history of the statute, and concluded that it was consistent with this interpretation.

The brother also argued that the father should be precluded from bringing the case due to abandonment, and cited a statute to that effect.  However, that statute had been enacted after the mother’s death.  The court held that the statutes could not be applied retroactively.

For these reasons, the Supreme Court affirmed most of the appellate court’s ruling, and reversed the ruling of the lower court.  It remanded the case to the trial court for further proceedings.

No. E2015-00697-SC-R11-CV (Tenn. Dec. 27, 2017).

See original opinion for exact language.  Legal citations omitted.

To learn more, see Child Support Laws in Tennessee.

See also Tennessee Parenting Plans and Child Support Worksheets: Building a Constructive Future for Your Family featuring actual examples of parenting plans and child support worksheets from real cases available on Amazon.com.