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Shook v. Gray

In this case regarding custody and visitation rights, the court of appeals remanded to the trial court with instructions to consider only the mother and father, and not the child's grandmother, with whom the child had lived for her entire life. By barring the trial court from considering the grandmother, the court of appeals unduly restricted the trial court's ability to protect the child's best interest. The court of appeals' judgment remanding the case is affirmed, but reversed to the extent the judgment limits the trial court's consideration of the role Shook should play in G.W.'s life, whether as conservator or a person with defined access rights. Texas Supreme Court, No. 11-0155, 10-05-2012.

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G.W., David Gray and Lucy Wood’s nine-year-old daughter, has lived with her maternal grandmother, Ann Shook, for her entire life. Although G.W.’s parents have been in and out of her life to varying degrees since she was born, no one disputes that at the time of the custody hearing the grandmother’s home was the only home G.W. had ever known. We are asked to decide whether the court of appeals erred by remanding this case to the trial court for hearings to determine the custody and visitation rights as between Gray and Wood only. We grant Shook’s motion for rehearing of her petition for review and, pursuant to Rule 59.1 of the Rules of Appellate Procedure, hold that, by barring the trial court from considering Shook, the court of appeals unduly restricted the trial court’s ability to protect the child’s best interest.

When G.W. was three-and-a-half years old, Gray filed an original suit affecting the parent-child relationship requesting that he and Wood be appointed joint managing conservators and that Wood be given the primary right to establish G.W.’s residence.*fn1 Shook intervened on the basis that she “has had actual care, control, and possession of [G.W.] for more than 6 months ending no more than 90 days preceding the date of filing of [the] petition.” See TEX. FAM. CODE § 102.003(a)(9).

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