Wallace v. Wallace
| Decision Date | 16 August 1996 |
| Docket Number | No. 28145,28145 |
| Citation | 112 Nev. 1015,922 P.2d 541 |
| Parties | Tracy Lynn WALLACE, Appellant, v. Pieter Kenneth WALLACE, Respondent. |
| Court | Nevada Supreme Court |
Todd Torvinen, Reno, for Respondent.
Appellant Tracy Vollmer (formerly Tracy Wallace) and respondent Pieter Wallace were married and had a son, Drake. After they divorced, Tracy gained physical custody of Drake, and she and Pieter shared joint legal custody. Around the time Tracy remarried, she and Pieter began to disagree about the amount of visitation Pieter should have. The dispute was taken before the district court, which established a visitation schedule and ordered certain abatements in Pieter's child support obligation.
Tracy appealed. She claims that the district court failed to consider Drake's best interests in establishing the visitation schedule, that the court erred in granting Pieter a reduction in his child support obligation for travel expenses connected to visitation, and that it erred in ordering visitation for Pieter's mother without conducting a hearing.
Tracy and Pieter were divorced on May 28, 1991, when their son, Drake, was less than a year old. They entered into a child custody and support and property settlement agreement, which the district court adopted in its divorce decree. Tracy and Pieter shared joint legal custody of Drake, and Tracy was awarded physical custody. Pieter received "reasonable rights of visitation" and was ordered to pay $250 per month in child support.
From the divorce until about September 1994, the parties agree that visitation occurred largely without problems. After Drake was about two years old, he began to stay overnight with Pieter, typically one or two nights a week. During the summer of 1994, Pieter was unemployed; he therefore paid only $100 a month in child support, but took care of Drake every weekday while Tracy worked.
In September 1994, Tracy remarried, and Pieter began a job with weekends off. He had worked weekends at his earlier job. The flexible visitation which occurred before ended. The parties arrived at an arrangement where Drake stayed with Pieter every other weekend. Initially, Drake also stayed overnight at Pieter's on Wednesdays. Tracy then stopped the overnight stay on Wednesdays because she felt that Drake was too tired and cranky the next day at his preschool. Pieter was not satisfied with the visitation he could exercise. After discussions between the parties failed, Pieter filed a motion with the district court on January 27, 1995, to establish specific visitation. Pieter later withdrew his motion, but Tracy filed her own. The court therefore held a hearing on the matter on October 16, 1995.
A child psychologist hired by Tracy was the first witness at the hearing. After seeing Drake in January 1995, he felt that Drake might be too young for midweek overnight visitations. The psychologist evaluated Drake again in September 1995, and his opinion regarding Wednesday overnight visitation remained basically unchanged. The psychologist had never spoken to Pieter about Drake's situation.
Tracy testified as follows. After Pieter began working weekdays with weekends off, he demanded to have Drake every weekend. When she refused and they argued, she told him to get an attorney. She denied ever threatening to withhold visitation if Pieter did not pay child support. On cross-examination, Tracy admitted that she told Pieter that he was in for a big court battle and that she would rather spend money than participate in mediation, which Pieter requested more than once. She also told Drake that because Pieter did not go to church, bad things would happen to Pieter and that Pieter did not take good care of Drake.
Pieter's mother testified that Tracy called her after remarrying and threatened to cut Pieter out of Drake's life regardless of the consequences to Drake.
Pieter testified to the following. In late September or early October 1995, Tracy threatened that Pieter would not see Drake if he did not immediately pay his child support for October. Pieter therefore opened an account with the district attorney's office to keep a record of his support payments. Pieter stated that his new wife had two children and that when Drake stayed overnight, all the children went to bed around eight or The district court filed a memorandum of decision on October 24, 1995, and a judgment consistent with the memorandum on December 6, 1995. The court stated that the case was basically a dispute over whether five-year-old Drake should spend Wednesday nights with his father. It noted that Tracy opposed increased visitation "because she feels that Drake's routine would become interrupted; that he has shown signs of fatigue when he returns from his father's home; and that she feels that his schooling would suffer." It found that Tracy had been "exercising control over Drake's relationship with his father in a manner which has undermined the father-son relationship." The court cited Tracy's informing her son that his father was bad for not going to church and telling the boy that his father did not take good care of him. The court stated that Drake "deserves a better view of his father than his mother is giving him and if more visitation will do the trick, then more visitation it will be." It therefore granted overnight stays on Wednesdays.
eight-thirty in the evening, the same time as Drake's bedtime at Tracy's. Drake also took naps. Tracy told Pieter that he could not see Drake as much because Drake had a new family and dad and that Drake would learn to live with it. She also warned Pieter that litigation would cost him a lot of money and that she would ruin him. One time Drake asked Pieter why Pieter did not like God and said that his mother said that bad things would happen to Pieter if he did not go to church. At the end of his direct testimony, Pieter informed the district court that the month before he had received a job offer in Atlanta and that he was going to move there in early 1996.
In case Pieter moved to Atlanta, the court granted him the right to have Drake one weekend each month, the Thanksgiving holiday, half of the Christmas holiday, a week at Easter, and seven weeks each summer. It also reduced Pieter's monthly child support by $100 in any month that he traveled to Reno or that Drake traveled to Atlanta for visitation, and it completely abated child support during summer weeks that Drake spent in Atlanta. If Pieter could not arrange to have Drake for a weekend during a month, the court ordered that Drake stay with Pieter's mother that month. Sometime after entry of the court's judgment, Pieter moved to Atlanta.
The district court imposed the visitation schedule without adequate notice and hearing
NRS 125A.290(1)(a) provides:
Any order awarding a party a right of visitation of a minor child must:
(a) Define that right with sufficient particularity to ensure that the rights of the parties can be properly enforced and that the best interest of the child is achieved.
Matters of custody and support of minor children rest in the sound discretion of the trial court. Culbertson v. Culbertson, 91 Nev. 230, 233, 533 P.2d 768, 770 (1975). A court decision regarding visitation is a "custody determination." NRS 125A.040(2). It is presumed that a trial court has properly exercised its discretion in determining a child's best interest. Culbertson, 91 Nev. at 233, 533 P.2d at 770.
Tracy contends that the court failed to consider Drake's best interest in establishing visitation. She claims that the only evidence in the record militates against the midweek overnight visitation ordered. The issue regarding overnight visitation on Wednesdays has been rendered moot by Pieter's move to Atlanta. But Tracy also opposes the visitation schedule which requires Drake, "who has never spent more than two or three days away from [his mother], [to] fly across the entire country to spend seven weeks in a home he has never seen, with a parent he probably will not have been with for many months."
We agree that the district court abused its discretion in imposing a visitation schedule based on Pieter's relocation to Atlanta without accepting evidence and hearing argument on the ramifications of such visitation. We do not question the court's conclusion that Tracy had improperly attempted to interfere with Drake's relationship with his father and that it was in Drake's best interest to spend We conclude that the district court's judgment in regard to visitation was precipitous and must be reversed. The court characterized the case before it as basically a dispute over whether Drake should spend Wednesday nights with his father but then went well beyond that contested dispute and ordered visitation of much greater impact. The court had little or no factual basis to determine that the visitation ordered was in Drake's best interest, and Tracy had no notice that the court would be considering visitation requiring Drake to travel thousands of miles and therefore had no opportunity to present evidence on that issue. Cf. Wiese v. Granata, 110 Nev. 1410, 1413, 887 P.2d 744, 746 (1994) (); Moser v. Moser, 108 Nev. 572, 576-77, 836 P.2d 63, 66 (1992) ().
more time with his father. However, neither the court nor Tracy were apprised of Pieter's move to Atlanta until late in the hearing. No evidence was presented and no arguments were heard regarding an appropriate visitation schedule given this new location, which was new to Drake and would require him to travel long distances to...
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