Cash kept in box shows child support, court rules

A father who squirreled away money for his daughter by making regular cash deposits into a lockbox he kept at his residence had done enough to show that he had made reasonable provisions for the child’s support, and his consent will thus be required for the girl’s adoption, the North Carolina Court of Appeals has ruled.

The child was conceived in 2012 when the father, Venson Westgate, and the mother, Brandi Wood, were living in Illinois. Wood subsequently moved to North Carolina with her new husband, and during the pregnancy rebuffed all offers of support from Westgate. Wood gave birth to the child in 2013 and promptly put her up for adoption.

Westgate objected to the adoption, and at a 2014 hearing testified that after Wood refused to accept his offers of support, he began withdrawing $100 or more in cash per month and putting into the box, which he said he did to ensure that the funds for his daughter were kept separate from his own funds. By the time of the hearing, the box held $3,260.

A Wake County judge ruled in favor of Westgate, finding that the lockbox deposits were a reasonable and legally sufficient method of providing support for the child. The adoptive parents appealed the ruling.

Under North Carolina law, a putative father’s consent is needed for adoption only if the father, among other requirements, has provided reasonable support for the mother or child, consistent with his means. The courts have held that this requirement can be met only by real, actual support—mere offers of support don’t suffice. As a result, putative fathers run into a bit of a roadblock when the mothers decline such offers.

In 2006, the state’s Supreme Court addressed these concerns by suggesting that putative fathers could meet their obligations in other ways, such as by creating a bank account or trust account in the child’s name. Later cases clarified that a formal account wasn’t the only means by which a father could show support, but there was no precedent considering the sort of higgledy-piggledy method of saving that Westgate had employed.

Lock, box, and two estranged parents

The Court of Appeals held that despite the absence of a paper trail or corroborating witnesses, Westgate’s testimony provided sufficient evidence to support the court’s ruling. Rejecting arguments made by adoptive parents, the court concluded that past cases had not created any sort of accounting requirements to show that a putative father’s support was real and tangible.

“The objective, bright line test established in Byrd and reaffirmed in Anderson focused on the distinction between mere offers or attempts and actual, tangible support,” Judge Linda Stephens wrote for the court. “While a formal record of payments by a father would certainly be illustrative of the latter, K.A.R. mandates that where there is competent evidence in the record to support a district court’s determination that … a putative father provided reasonable and consistent payments for the support of his child in accordance with his financial means, this Court will not disturb such a determination.”

Travis Taylor of Marshall & Taylor in Raleigh represented Westgate. Taylor praised the court’s decision, saying that a strict interpretation of the statute would be unrealistic given that many people don’t have bank accounts, and that the law was intended to provide flexibility to account for that.

“I think the ruling clarifies that if someone is making a consistent, regular effort to either save money or purchase items, I think it shows that there is a desire to be involved, to be a father,” Taylor said. “It seems unrealistic to me that a father who may be living in a different state or have a strained relationship with the mother, and depending on his educational level, would have the wherewithal to know that he needs to go open a bank account or an account that’s held in trust for an unborn child.”

Mike Harrell of Manning, Fulton and Skinner in Raleigh represented the adoptive parents. Harrell said that his clients would likely petition for discretionary review of the decision by the Supreme Court and contended that the decision loosens, if not eliminates, many of the bright line tests established in earlier cases by the Supreme Court for what constitutes legally sufficient support by a putative father.

“I think that if this decision is allowed to stand, then it’s pretty much going to gut the payment prong of the consent statute for putative fathers,” Harrell said. “This was a guy who effectively had no third-party corroborative witnesses and didn’t really even have a corroborative payment trail. We couldn’t really effectively trace out how all this cash came into this supposed lockbox … all this guy had was his word and a pile of cash.”

The 18-page decision is In re Adoption of C.H.M. (Lawyers Weekly No. 011-225-16). The full text of the opinion is available online at nclawyersweekly.com.

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