Brumfield v. Brumfield

• Decision Date: 26 January 1953
• Docket Number: No. 4028,4028
• Citation: 194 Va. 577,74 S.E.2d 170
• Court: Virginia Supreme Court
• Parties: ELOIE BRUMFIED, AN INFANT v. ROY BENNETT BRUMFIELD Record

Page 170

74 S.E.2d 170

194 Va. 577

ELOIE BRUMFIED, AN INFANT v. ROY BENNETT BRUMFIELD

Record No. 4028.

Supreme Court of Appeals of Virginia

January 26, 1953.

Edmunds, Whitehead, Baldwin & Graves, for plaintiff in error.

Howard W. Rhodes, Jr. and James C. Holloran, Jr., for defendant in error.

JUDGE: BUCHANAN

BUCHANAN, J., delivered the opinion of the court.

The plaintiff in this action is the infant daughter of the defendant. She brought this suit against her father to recover damages for injuries which she alleged were due to his gross negligence in operating an automobile in which she was riding with him as a guest. By appropriate pleadings issue was joined on whether the plaintiff had been emancipated. A jury being waived, the court heard the evidence ore tenus on the question of emancipation and decided that the plaintiff had not been emancipated, was therefore not entitled to maintain the action, and entered final judgment for the defendant. The main assignment of error is to that ruling.

All of the evidence in the case comes from the defendant and his mother, they being the father and grandmother of the infant plaintiff, who is the only child of the defendant and his wife. The wife died November 26, 1949, when the plaintiff was about eleven years old. Some three weeks prior to the wife's death, when she was preparing to go to the sanatorium where she afterwards died, she turned the child over to the grandmother, saying, 'I am giving you over to Grandmother. ' The grandmother so testified, and added, 'And my son gave her over to me, said I was to have her, to look after her and take care of her. ' The court asked her if this was just an arrangement by which the child was turned over to her, and she said it was; but she also said that she agreed to take the child and look after her 'as long as I lived,' and that if the mother had recovered and asked for the child she would have 'told her to come on out and stay with us;' and that she would not have delivered the child back to its father if he had asked for her.

The grandmother, sixty-five years old, is a widow with eleven children and makes her home with one of her daughters in the town of Gretna. She took the child there to live and testified that from that time until the happening of the accident on July 4, 1951, after which the child went to the hospital, she had looked after the child, supported her and made the decisions with respect to her welfare and comfort; that during that time her father had not contributed anything toward her support and maintenance, and she had never asked him to do so; that he asked her permission when he wanted to take his daughter to Sunday school or to go riding, and he had never exercised any parental authority over the child during the time the latter was with her; that there had been no adoption proceedings and no mention ever made of that. She testified that she owned a farm, which was rented to another one of her sons, where she spent a week or more at a time in the summer and from which she received a share of the products, amounting to five or six hundred dollars a year.

The father of the plaintiff, the defendant in this action, is about forty years old and still a widower. He works in Danville, 28 miles from Gretna, and makes $48 a week. He lives there in a room shared with another man. He testified that his daughter was with his mother as a matter of convenience and that there had been no legal proceedings to divest him of his rights to her; that he went to see his daughter about once a week, took her presents on her birthday and at Christmas and had given her some money; that he considered his daughter his dependent, and had so listed her on his income tax report ever since his wife died. He was asked whether at the time he turned the child over to his mother it was his intention to be relieved from contribuing to her support, and he replied, 'No, sir, I didn't feel that way about it. ' He said that at that time he had a load to carry, had burial expenses and doctor bills to pay and things of that kind; that he was not undertaking 'to wash his hands' of the child and that if his mother had not been able to care for her he would do all he could to support her. He was asked whether he had obligated himself to pay her bills at the hospital and replied that he had signed papers there about some insurance he carried, 'a little protection for her hospital bill.'

On cross-examination he said he turned the child over to his mother to rear as she saw fit, with nothing said about having the child back any time he wanted it; that he was not in a position to look after her and was concerned with her welfare; that he had not tried to make any decisions as to her schooling, medical care or support, and did not think he had a right to do that because he had turned all of his parental authority over to his mother.

Whether the defendant had emancipated his daughter so as to give her the right to maintain this action against him for a tort was a question of fact under the evidence so adduced. Cf. Wood v. Wood, 135 Conn. 280, 63 A.2d 586.

The conclusion of a trial judge after an ore tenus hearing on a question of fact is entitled to great weight because he saw and heard the witnesses testify. Wyckoff Pipe, Etc., Co. v. Saunders, 175 Va. 512, 516, 9 S.E.2d 318, 320. His judgment on the evidence cannot be disturbed unless it is plainly wrong or without evidence to support it. Code 1950, § 8-491. Like the verdict of a jury it settles the conflicts in the evidence in favor of the successful party and entitles him to all reasonable inferences from the testimony. The decision here by the trial court adverse to the plaintiff is supported by the evidence and the fair inferences from it and hence is controlling on this appeal. Among other things the court doubtless considered the effect on the testimony of the two witnesses of the fact that the defendant carried liability insurance enough to pay the amount sued for. The fact that the father did not intend to be completely relieved of the support of his only child, and continued to claim her as his dependent for income tax purposes, furnished substantial basis for the court's conclusion. The over-all facts and circumstances are consistent with a temporary custody given because of an emergency.

It is well settled, and is not controverted in this case, that an emancipated infant may maintain a tort action against a parent. Annotation19 A.L.R.2d at p. 437 and cases there cited. Emancipation, however, is never presumed but must be clearly proved and the burden of proof rests upon the person alleging it. American Products Co. v. Villwock, 7 Wash.2d 246, 109 P.2d 570, 132 A.L.R. 1010 at pp. 1024-25; Cafaro v. Cafaro, 118 N.J. 123, 191 A. 472. It must be determined upon the peculiar facts and circumstances of each case. Fiedler v. Potter, 180 Tenn. 176, 172 S.W.2d 1007, 1009; Spurgeon v. Mission State Bank, 8 Cir., 151 F.2d 702.

Emancipation of a minor may be express or implied, partial or complete. Complete emancipation means the freeing of the child for all the period of its minority from the care, custody, control and service of its parents, conferring on the child the right to its own earnings and terminating the parents' legal obligation to support it. Partial emancipation frees the child for only a part of the period of minority, or from only a part of the parents' rights, or for some special purpose such as the right to its own wages. 67 C.J.S., Parent and Child, §§ 86-89, pp. 811-815; 39 Am. Jur., Parent and Child, § 64, p. 702; American Products Co. v. Villwock, supra; Fiedler v. Potter, supra. Cf. Buxton v. Bishop, 185 Va. 1, 37 S.E.2d 755, 165 A.L.R. 719 and Annotation beginning at p. 723.

'Parental emancipation was unknown to the common law. Although it ordinarily relates to the services and earnings of the child and the right to sue and recover therefor * * *, and, so confined, is termed partial emancipation * * *, in its general sense it signifies a surrender and renunciation of the correlative rights and duties touching the care, custody, and earnings of the child. * *...