BREVARD COUNTY, Fla. — There will be four chairs at the Thanksgiving dinner table at Stan and Margo Linder’s Brevard County home.
Two will be empty.
One would have been filled by their daughter, who died of an aneurism last year. The other would have been for their granddaughter, who they raised while her mother was ill.
Weeks after the Linders’ daughter died, their granddaughter’s biological father showed up and took her to Jacksonville.
They have been mired in a court battle seeking visitation rights ever since.
Read the law: Grandparental Visitation Rights
The Linders were hopeful that Florida’s expanded grandparents rights law would help them to see their granddaughter more. But what they’ve found is they still have basically no right to see her, even under the new law.
Passed earlier this year, the expansion of the grandparents rights law gave grandparents the right for visitation when one of the child’s parents is dead or in a vegetative state and the other is a convicted felon.
That is not the case for the Linders.
But lawmakers made the grandparents rights expansion very narrow on purpose, said WFTV legal analyst Bill Sheaffer.
“Courts are going to narrowly interpret these statutes,” he said. “They don’t want to impede parental rights at the sake of the grandparent’s rights.”
Florida courts have consistently sided with parents over grandparents and even under the expanded law, most grandparents won’t qualify, Sheaffer said.
While the Linders are going to miss this Thanksgiving with their granddaughter, they are confident that someday they will be reunited.
“Because of that bond, I don’t think she’s going to forget us,” Margo Linder said. “We’re certainly not going to forget her.”
Cox Media Group
