Carome v. Carome
| Decision Date | 28 October 2021 |
| Docket Number | No. 19-FM-0854,19-FM-0854 |
| Citation | 262 A.3d 242 |
| Parties | Asli CAROME, Appellant, v. Patrick J. CAROME, Appellee. |
| Court | D.C. Court of Appeals |
Ayesha N. Khan for appellant.
Patrick J. Carome, pro se.
John A. Bourgeois and Steven M. Klepper were on the brief for Network for Victim Recovery of DC et al., amici curiae in support of appellant.
Before Blackburne-Rigsby, Chief Judge, and Glickman and McLeese, Associate Judges.
For a second time, Asli Carome appeals the denial of her petition for a civil protection order (CPO) against her then-husband Patrick Carome. Ms. Carome claimed that on October 10, 2017, Mr. Carome assaulted her and destroyed her personal property, thereby committing criminal offenses against her that justified the issuance of a CPO under the Intrafamily Offenses Act ("the Act"). D.C. Code §§ 16-1001 - 1006 (). After the trial court declined to issue a CPO, Ms. Carome appealed to this court, Carome v. Carome , No. 18-FM-368, Mem. Op. & J., 207 A.3d 175 (D.C. Apr. 4, 2019) (hereinafter Carome I ), which then remanded the case back to the trial court. Specifically, this court "authorized [the trial court] to conduct further proceedings to determine whether there ha[d] been any new developments since the last hearing that would [have] affect[ed] Ms. Carome's petition." The trial court then declined to take additional evidence and again denied Ms. Carome's request for a CPO. Ms. Carome filed a timely appeal. Prior to oral arguments in the instant case, this court decided Ramirez v. Salvattera , which clarified the "good cause" standard used when considering the extension of a CPO. 232 A.3d 169 (D.C. 2020). Although the facts in Ramirez differ significantly in some respects, we believe that Ramirez requires evidence of prior relevant acts to be considered by the trial court in making the threshold determination of whether there is good cause to believe that an intrafamily offense occurred. We hold that Ramirez applies in instances of initial CPO issuances, and we therefore remand this case to the trial court for further proceedings consistent with the principles outlined in Ramirez and explained below.
Ms. Carome's petition for a CPO followed an incident that occurred at the Caromes’ residence on the morning of October 10, 2017. According to Ms. Carome's testimony, on that morning she entered Mr. Carome's bathroom to obtain his explanation for where he had been the previous evening. He refused to answer and ordered her to get out. Ms. Carome claimed that as she turned to leave, she accidentally knocked one of her husband's toiletry items off a countertop. She testified that Mr. Carome then pushed her in the back as she exited his bathroom. He allegedly followed her into her bathroom and pushed her a second time, causing her to hit her head against the wall. Next, Mr. Carome threw her toiletries and other items off her bathroom counter to the floor, causing her porcelain toothbrush holder to shatter on impact.
Mr. Carome testified to a different version of events. After Ms. Carome entered his bathroom, he testified, she intentionally swept an entire tray of his toiletries to the floor. To corroborate this claim, Mr. Carome introduced in evidence photographs taken by the police that morning showing his toiletries and toiletry tray strewn on his bathroom floor. In retaliation, he immediately walked into his wife's bathroom ahead of her and swept her toiletry items off her sink, shattering her toothbrush holder. Mr. Carome denied pushing or otherwise assaulting Ms. Carome at any time; rather, he testified, she pushed him while they were in her bathroom, causing him to injure his back against the windowsill. Ms. Carome denied pushing Mr. Carome in her bathroom.
Ms. Carome called the police and reported what happened to the two officers who responded. Mr. Carome denied pushing Ms. Carome and showed the officers the toiletries she allegedly knocked on his bathroom floor and the injury she allegedly caused to his back. The police took Mr. Carome to the hospital for assessment and treatment of the injury. The police placed both Ms. Carome and Mr. Carome under arrest, although neither of them was charged. Two days later, on October 12, 2017, Ms. Carome filed a petition for a CPO against Mr. Carome and obtained a temporary protective order (TPO).
At the hearing on her CPO petition, Ms. Carome described three prior incidents in which her husband allegedly destroyed her property or assaulted her. On one night in 2013, Mr. Carome entered her home office, while she was nearby, and threw her binders, papers, and other personal items over the balcony onto the front lawn. Ms. Carome testified that her books and papers were torn after being thrown on the front lawn, and her son, who observed the incident, also testified that her personal papers, books, and other items were damaged by the fall.
In November 2016, Ms. Carome testified, her husband destroyed her bonsai plants by putting them down the kitchen garbage disposal while she was upstairs ("the bonsai incident"). And the following month, when she was standing in the hallway and blocking his path, Mr. Carome put his two hands on her shoulders to push her to the side in order to "clear[ ] the way ... for him to continue walking down the hallway."
Mr. Carome denied the latter "pushing" incident but admitted that he threw a single item of his wife's property, either a paperweight or a book, off the balcony on one occasion and destroyed her bonsai plants on another. He acknowledged that this "was a way of expressing real anger and frustration at [Ms. Carome]."
After hearing all the testimony and reviewing all the exhibits, the trial court orally denied Ms. Carome's petition for a CPO. Noting that her accounts of the October 10, 2017, incident were inconsistent as they related to "when she was pushed, the number of times she was pushed and the sequence of events that took place," the judge found her testimony about an assault and the destruction of her property to be "unreliable and untrustworthy as to what happened and how things happened that early morning." Moreover, the judge found Ms. Carome's explanations for her different stories to be unpersuasive. Stating that there was "nothing to corroborate Ms. Carome's testimony" regarding the alleged offenses on October 10, the judge concluded that Ms. Carome "has not shown that there is good cause to believe ... an intrafamily offense was committed" and denied her request for a CPO.
After a timely appeal, this court issued Carome I , which vacated the trial court's decision and remanded for further proceedings. We found that the trial court erred when it failed to address Ms. Carome's claim of destruction of property, given that Mr. Carome admitted to breaking Ms. Carome's porcelain toothbrush holder. We also found that the trial court failed to consider whether a CPO was appropriate based on the destruction of property claim. We therefore "vacate[d] the decision denying Ms. Carome relief and remand[ed] for the trial court to make additional findings of fact and conclusions of law regarding the alleged malicious destruction of property offense and prior similar conduct by Mr. Carome." Carome I , at 7. In doing so, we "authorized [the trial court] to conduct further proceedings to determine whether there ha[d] been any new developments since the last hearing that would affect Ms. Carome's petition." Id.
The trial court held a status hearing in this matter on August 8, 2019, to hear arguments from the parties regarding whether there was any need for further evidentiary proceedings. At the status hearing, Ms. Carome's counsel pointed to Mr. Carome's pattern of prior behavior, specifically mentioning the bonsai incident and the incident in which Mr. Carome threw Ms. Carome's belongings off a balcony. Ms. Carome's counsel also asked the court to take additional evidence because that same "pattern of conduct" had continued after October 10, 2017. But when he tried to describe the various post-October 10 incidents, the court instructed counsel only to list the "categories of events" "without necessarily giving me all the specifics."
On August 19, 2019, the trial court issued a written order declining to take additional evidence and again denying Ms. Carome's request for a CPO. The court credited Mr. Carome's testimony that he did not push Ms. Carome on October 10, 2017, and that he had never pushed Ms. Carome in the past, including in December 2016. The trial court acknowledged that malicious destruction of property may form the basis for a CPO, but held that Ms. Carome had not demonstrated that Mr. Carome committed that crime on October 10, 2017, because she had not shown that Mr. Carome acted without mitigation, that is, without "adequate provocation" of the kind that "would cause an ordinary, reasonable person to lose his or her self-control." (citing 1 Criminal Jury Instructions for DC Instruction 5.400 (2020)).
On appeal, Ms. Carome notes that the trial court's one-sentence treatment of the December 2016 incident was presented without any rationale and implicitly discounted the testimony of Ms. Carome's son, who allegedly witnessed the event. As such, Ms. Carome argues that the trial court erred by failing to "consider all relevant factors and not rely on any improper factors." J.O. v. O.E. , 100 A.3d 478, 481 (D.C. 2014).
The trial court made no mention of the earlier incidents of property destruction, including the November 2016 bonsai incident that Mr. Carome admitted to and that had taken place just one month before the December 2016 incident that the trial court addressed, or the 2013 incident in which, as Mr. Carome conceded, he threw at least one of Ms. Carome's personal items off a balcony. The trial court also concluded that there was...
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