Unwrap the Details of Holiday Visitation
Hang On — The FBI Robbed a Bank?
How Parents Split the Season
The holiday season is almost here! How will you be spending it? For divorced couples with children, the answer will depend on the content of your parenting plan. Holiday visitation is unique and does not follow the residential time-sharing schedule. Family courts understand that holidays are emotional and meaningful times for many people. So, Florida’s default structure is for parents to split holiday time with their children 50/50. In fact, an appellate court found that an uneven arrangement can be an abuse of discretionary power by the judge unless there is proof that an unconventional split will be in the child’s best interests. How parents should equally split the holidays often causes some disagreement, but a few options are standard among parenting plans. First, it helps to understand what the courts define as a holiday. The term doesn’t only encompass occasions like Thanksgiving and Christmas; it includes other times off school, including winter break and summer vacation. One typical arrangement involves alternate holiday sharing. For example, a mother may have the children on Thanksgiving in even years while the father has the same in odd years. Similarly, one parent may have the entire fall break in even years while the other has summer vacation. Typically, plans strive to balance visitation so both parents receive substantial holiday time with the children each year. Another approach involves splitting the holidays themselves. Parents might alternate weeks of visitation during summer vacation, or one might spend time with the children during the first half and the other during the second half. Some plans ensure one parent has the child during the bulk of the day on Christmas but still give the other parent a small amount of visitation time. Other parenting plans might assign specific holidays permanently to each parent. That approach is most common with Mother’s Day and Father’s Day. But fixed holidays may also occur when one parent celebrates a holiday and the other does not. For example, suppose the child has one Jewish and one Christian parent. In that case, the Christian parent will typically be with the child on Christmas, and the Jewish parent likely has visitation every Passover. If you have questions about your holiday time-sharing schedule or have had a substantial change in circumstances that require an update to the plan, Bruce Law can help. Call us today to schedule a consultation!
The Story Behind a Mind- Blowing California Raid “This was the largest armed robbery in United States history, and it was committed by the FBI.” That jaw-dropping statement came from Robert Frommer, an attorney representing several hundred people whose safe deposit boxes were emptied during an FBI raid in 2021. The story is wild from start to finish. On that fateful day in March, armed FBI agents stormed a California strip mall and burst into a U.S. Private Vaults bank branch. They searched 1,400 safe deposit boxes and confiscated the contents of many of them — making off with roughly $86 million, plus valuable collectibles like coins, gold, and jewelry. Why would the agency do this? Well, after a two-year investigation, the FBI suspected U.S. Private Vaults was catering to drug dealers and other criminals hiding cash in Los Angeles. So, the agency obtained a warrant and raided the bank to look for proof. And apparently, they found it. After the raid, U.S. Private Vaults pleaded guilty to conspiracy to launder drug money and closed its doors for good. However, that wasn’t the end of the saga. Remember attorney Robert Frommer? Roughly 400 people who kept their money at U.S. Private Vaults hired him to get the contents of their safe deposit boxes back from the FBI. They said they weren’t criminals and wanted their money back. One of those people was Joseph Ruiz, who lost $57,000 in savings during the FBI raid. He filed a lawsuit, claiming the raid was unconstitutional. When the FBI accused Ruiz of making his money through illegal drug sales, Ruiz showed proof of his income, and in August 2021, the FBI agreed to return his funds. However, not every U.S. Private Vaults customer has been so lucky. In September 2022, a judge ruled that the FBI raid was legal under civil forfeiture laws and dismissed the depositors’ class-action lawsuit. An FBI spokesperson also said the agency was putting a process in place to return items to innocent owners, but as of March 2023, at least one person still claimed she hadn’t gotten her money back — even though she wasn’t criminally charged.
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