A man was murdered at my meth-addict ex’s house a few days ago. I still can't get his rights terminated.

There NEEDS to be a nationwide discourse regarding the discrepancy in how family court judges handle termination of parental rights versus how they are handled in foster care cases. If I was not in the picture, the county would have stepped in and my ex would have lost his rights years ago. But because I am stable, it falls on ME to file for termination, and it likely won’t be granted, because Family Court is built upon the (flawed) premise that “it is in the best interests of children that they benefit from frequent and continuing contact from both parents” (no matter how f#cked up the parent may be).

This screenshot is from a free legal resource where I asked if this new information would finally be the nail in the coffin. Nope, even a murder at his home is not enough. And no, he is not a suspect, although I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s the actual murderer.

Quick breakdown of events:

· I initially divorced my ex because he’d spiraled into addiction and was using meth. He denied this, which led to a year-long wild goose chase of him failing over 10 (!) drug tests and denying the results of each one.

· During this time, I was forced to allow visits to continue at his house. The children would come home with terrible stories of witnessing CPR, sleeping on the floor next to people who were passed out, missing school because dad took them to the casino instead, and on and on. The judge insisted that “drug abuse is not necessarily child abuse”.

· My son came home from a visit and complained that he had asked for water in the middle of the night and that his dad’s friend gave him some, but it tasted like smoke and made him feel funny. I took him to a drug testing facility and it came back positive for meth.

· Finally, ex was put on supervised visitation and a step-up plan. The terms of the step-up plan were: At a random time, the supervised visitation monitor would direct him to take a drug test and he would have to comply. If he passed the drug test, he would gradually get unsupervised visits, starting with hours, then days. However, every time the monitor asked him to test he danced around it with absurd reasons for why he couldn’t. The monitor stopped asking.

It’s been 4 years now. No progress, and a murder at his house. Why can’t my children and I be free? And I HOPE FDS wouldn’t do this, because everyone else does, but please don’t shame me for choosing him or lump me in with him as a tweaker. He is not the man I married and I would have never chosen him if I knew how he would end up. Also, please no hate for the attorney who answered.

This is an honest answer based on experience and is what my former attorney, a female always advised me: Don’t rock the boat. Once you have supervised, you are very unlikely to get anything more. If you move to terminate rights altogether, judges will punish you and loosen the restrictions instead.