Things got ugly a few months after our dad died.

All of my siblings, except the baby of the family, were at the old house and we talked about who would be in charge of taking care of the ‘estate.’ We all agreed it would be me, I was local, I was the one everyone said they could trust, I’m the one with the stable job. I think they thought they could trust me because I had the most to lose if I cheated. The loss of my public safety job would be too big for me to cheat my siblings. I would not have cheated them anyway.

We had to find an attorney and chose the one who handled my dad’s portion of the divorce. We had to pick someone and we thought he might know some of my dad’s assets. Dad had records, but they weren’t extensive and trying to find everything isn’t easy. He had some life insurance, a beat up old truck and a car in terrible shape. Some stocks and investments in some kind of real estate holding companies (which were nearly worthless). He had the house. We thought he was the sole owner; on paper he was, but my brother made a claim that he had loaned dad money to buy out mom and Daniel claimed never to have been paid back. There was an agreement to sell him half the house.

Being the administrator of an estate, there was no will, I had a fudiciary repsonsibiliyty to guarantee such a claim had the proper backing. I had talked to Daniel about it, and suggested that perhaps the easiest way to settle this was to figure out how much each of the remaining of us kids would pony up to settle that score. I cannot remember how it -became a no-go; one or more felt like it wasn’t right or did not want to give Daniel money. No one knew of this agreement between dad and Daniel prior to this time.

It got ugly. Daniel claimed my sister Micki stole all the records from dad’s files, a claim she denies. She did take all the files because we needed to go through them, and I gave them to the attorney. No record of this promise to sell real estate was ever located. Daniel came up with a copy; it looked like a copy of a copy. He said the orginal was stolen. Micki said there never was such a document in the files, I went through them, the attorney went through them, I don’t believe the attorney had a reason to lie, Micki wouldn’t and neither would, or did, I.

Daniel convinced one of my sisters, Shannon, and my mother, who was at the time the legal guardian to my minor brother, to join him in a tort action to remove me as the administrator of the estate, have himself made the administrator, and obtain half of the house pursuant to the documents he had, the agreement to sell him half of the house. I did not just accept the document, on advice of the estate attorney and the advice of my other two sisters.

The bitterness results from the affidavits Daniel, my sister Shannon, and my mother swore to: that they had knowledge and could prove that I was cheating the estate and using funds from the estate for my personal gain.