Grandparents Refuse To Give Child Back to To Mother And Father

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ncfather

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My jurisdiction is: North Carolina, NC

Around November of 2006, my wifes parents offered to let our son come stay with them for a few months while we were trying to fix up a new place that we moved into. Early March, they contact us and told us they needed a legal document stating that our son was living with them temporarily, and then they picked us up and took us to their attorney's office to sign what we now have learned was a "Consent for Permanent Custody". The order states we are not giving up our parental rights and enter into this voluntarily while we attempt to stabilize our situation. It also grants us visitation rights to be no less than alternating Saturdays from 3-7pm. After we signed the consent order, the home we were living was burned down and we lost everything. We were able to move to a new place, but a few months later we decided to separate due to irreconcilable differences. We agreed to and still maintain a healthy friendship for the sake of our child and have attended all of our visitations together to help keep this from causing our child unfair stress.

The grandparents have violated everything in their Consent Order. The have refused to allow many scheduled visitations, refuse for ANY unsupervised visitations even though the order does not state this (they sit there a few feet away and intervene whenever possible), refuse to allow ANY visitations outside of the minimum. The will not allow anyone else to spend any time with the child, supervised or otherwise. They refuse to provide us with any information on the child, are constantly bad mouthing us in front of him, and now they will not let the child refer to his mother by anything other than her first name. This is their daughter, who has a long history of emotional abuse from both of them. They refuse to give us back custody of our son, and have threatened if we try to get him we will never see him again.

We have emails to document all this and so much more. We have audio recordings and video recordings that clearly prove our case (we hope).

All we want is custody of our son back. They wont let us see him or visit him, we have each individually stabilized our financial situations - she has met someone else and is about to get married, the same is true for me. We are both have no drug, criminal, or otherwise negative history. She and I both agree that we want joint custody, but I will be the primary residential parent. We will be filing for this together.

We live in Mecklenburg County, NC - this is also where the original consent order was filed.

I know Contempt applies since they have violated everything in the original agreement. There are only 8 points they listed, and each one they have violated on multiple documented occasions.
They also got the consent order by lying to us and tricking us, and we can prove that as well, but we want a fast solution and I don't think there is one if we focus on this.

A Motion to Modify Custody will hopefully give us what we want, but I want to know what the fastest way to go about this is. I have extensively reviewed all the general statutes, rules of the court, and pro se forms and tools available. I have desperately tried to save enough for an attorney, but I am scared if he is there any longer that he will not even know who we are and I don't have enough to pay someone else right now.

I have witnessed them emotionally abusing the child on numerous occasions, grabbing him, yelling at him, trying to intimidate him - also the grandmother has lied to his doctors about his medical history and refused to give him medications he has been prescribed. We know this only because we had to get the medical records to find out, she refuses to cooperate and has lied to us saying she took him to the doctor many times when she didn't.

She abuses prescription medications (it is also in the court order that this is not to be allowed), but we might have a tough time proving that. She has no self control and repeatedly loses her temper in front of the child.

I feel confident she has no grounds to keep my son, and I will be able to regain custody. But I am scared for his well being right now, and they are refusing to allow me to spend time with him, even though it is court ordered. What is the QUICKEST way to go about this?

My plans are to either file:
A Ex Parte Order on the grounds for significant emotional damage to the child if he stays with them
and a Motion to Modify Custody (with all of the many issues and violations and demonstrating a significant change in circumstances)

or

A Motion to Show Cause
Although I have heard that the judge CANNOT remove custody from them if it is just a Contempt Hearing. This is what we want.

I have also read a bit about Revocation of Consent and some other ways we might be able to go about this, but not much dealing with the GRANDPARENTS vs. BOTH NATURAL PARENTS when custody was not removed from the natural parents. I also read that they should have filed for 3rd party custody, but I guess since they tricked us into signing the Consent, they didn't have to do that.

As I said, me and my ex are in complete agreement on the caretaking of our son. We have a parenting agreement that we can submit, or if we can just get custody back and then keep the courts out of it, that would be great. We hate to waste their time on something that seems pretty black and white.

Let me know if you need any more information. I need to go file this paperwork on Monday to get things moving ASAP.

Thanks!
 
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