Within the last five years, the issue of evidence outside of the record being considered by the trial court was raised in an appeal from a custody order in CMP v. MP, 54 A.3 950 (Pa. Super. 212)). Recently, the case of Johnson v. Johnson, 153 A.3 318 (Pa. Super. 2016), was decided and the vacating and remanding of the order was based on a similar reasoning. The Johnson case is a support case. In Johnson, according to the opinion, the parties are the parents of a daughter who suffered severe mental illness since the age of 7. In 2002, when the father filed a petition to terminate support for his emancipating son, the trial court ordered that the father’s support obligation for the parties’ daughter, who was 26 years old at time, would remain. Twelve years later, the father filed a petition to modify the support order pertaining to their then 39-year-old daughter because: his retirement from employment; his ineligibility for continuing the daughter’s medical insurance coverage under his former company’s health insurance policy; and his request that the daughter secure coverage under the “The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.” The father then amended his petition to include a request to terminate the support order “upon the allegation that Ms. Gardner [daughter], who is now 39 years of age, is no longer a dependent child.”
Under Pennsylvania law, child support terminates upon a child reaching age 18 or graduating from high school, whichever occurs last. However, child support can continue after a child turns 18 or graduates high school where a child “is too feeble physically or mentally to support itself.” As highlighted in the Johnson case, “it is the adult child’s burden to prove the conditions that make it impossible for her to be employed.”
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