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Mother faces homelessness following custody battle
N.C. woman loses her children and faces assault charges
Friday, Nov. 27, 2009
 Click here to enlarge this photo Staff photo by JOHN WHARTON
Christine Plummer stands next to the minivan that she expects will become her home again next week after an expensive court dispute over the custody of her children.
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Thanksgiving found Christine Plummer with a week to go before she loses her home and moves back into her minivan, after a lengthy legal battle left her with lawyer bills and without custody of her children.
The woman from western North Carolina has learned some hard lessons while living in St. Mary's County.
"I started figuring out how the county works," she said.
Plummer, 36, also faces trial next month on a charge of committing a second-degree assault last October on her husband at her Great Mills area home.
Christopher Plummer told police that he dropped the two children off with his wife before the couple got into an argument, according to court papers alleging she struck him in the face and also punched him three times in the groin.
In addition, Christine Plummer is charged with violating a court order a week later to have no contact with her husband, in charging papers stating he reported at the sheriff's office that she had sent him a text message inquiring if their daughter was participating in gymnastics that day.
Christine Plummer said last week that she was defending herself during the dispute outside her home, and that her text message a week later was to find out if her daughter needed her leotard.
The woman said she will be seeking a public defender to represent her next month on the assault charge.
The criminal charges are the most recent in a series of legal entanglements that began last year, which she said forced her to rely on relatives to help with her lawyer bills.
She said they no longer can afford to assist her further, and that her pay at a restaurant job won't allow her to keep her home, where her children now visit her five nights every two weeks.
"I'm getting ready to be homeless, again, because of all this," she said, recalling a previous exodus from her husband's military housing. "Over the summer, I lived in my van."
The couple married in 1999 when he was stationed at a Marine Corps air station in eastern North Carolina, she said, and they moved to St. Mary's in 2007 upon his transfer to Patuxent River Naval Air Station.
They went through a brief separation while he was stationed in 2002 in Florida, she said, but reunited and moved here with their two children, now age 4 and 2. Christine Plummer also has an older son, now 14, from a previous marriage, an autistic child who now is living with a grandmother in North Carolina.
"I can't fight this battle and give him the attention and the help that he needs," his mother said.
The couple separated in January 2008, she said, and she and the three children were in North Carolina for seven months before a second attempt at reconciliation, with plans for marital counseling, went nowhere.
Christopher Plummer moved out of the couple's home in October 2008, she said, and she and the three children remained in his base housing as he moved in with a friend.
She said her husband would come by daily to visit the children after work, and sometimes would stay for dinner, but she rejected his eventual decision to draw up a separation agreement from the Internet.
"It's not the right thing to do," she said. "We needed to work on our marriage."
In March of this year, she said, she was taking her older son to an appointment in Washington, D.C., when her husband removed the rest of his belongings and their two children from base housing residence while he was watching them that day.
On March 13, she said, she was in St. Mary's Circuit Judge Michael J. Stamm's chambers along with her husband's lawyer, Daniel J. Guenther, and she agreed to give her husband custody of the children.
"I don't remember signing that he could have custody of my children," Christine Plummer said. "I had no lawyer. I was by myself."
That initial agreement limited her contact with the children to supervised visitation, at a care facility.
"You go to Center for Children, and you're there for one hour in front of somebody," she said, and a more open visitation plan that her husband adhered to still didn't give her any time alone with the children
"He would stand right beside me," she said.
She said two protective order petitions were filed against her over the spring and summer, including one accusing her of not getting the 2-year-old boy his immunization vaccinations. She said a doctor told her to delay them because the child had a fever and ear infection.
The ongoing custody dispute and its allegations against the children's mother kept them away from her for as long as 30 days at a time, she said, and getting those missed days credited back to her did not ease the disruption.
"The children thought I had abandoned them," she said.
Christine Plummer said that Stamm advised her at that initial meeting in his chambers that she needed a lawyer, and that the judge mentioned the name of local attorney Samuel C.P. Baldwin Jr., who in turn referred her to his firm's associate, Troy C. Hanson.
Christopher Plummer's complaint for divorce initiated last year includes court filings by Guenther alleging that the wife's conduct during the marriage included breaking a glass on her husband's face in 2002, slashing his Marine Corps uniforms last spring and sending him at least 20 "hate text messages" last June.
A subsequent complaint also asked that the husband be given custody of the children, in part due to his wife's "rapidly escalating mental instability."
Hanson countered that his client "has never lost control or placed the children in an emotionally damaging environment" and argued that she should be given custody of them.
John A. Robotham, Christine Plummer's second lawyer in the case, also filed responses rejecting the allegations against her and countered that the husband had threatened to harm her and himself.
She said she paid her first lawyer's firm about $5,500 for its services, and that she still owes $1,500 on a $3,500 promissory note she entered with her second lawyer's firm.
"I have no more money," she said. "I'm done. I'm broke."
Christine Plummer said that court Master F. Michael Harris acknowledged that she and her husband were "both good parents" during the court proceedings that led to a series of custody and visitation rulings.
She has filed on her own an exception to the master's recommendations, however, writing that they "were capricious and were inconsistent with the evidence," and that the master ordered no schedule for her to have visitation with the couple's two children when her husband is reassigned next year to go to San Diego.
"Master Harris knows [Christopher Plummer] has orders to go to California, and has allowed him to have the kids," she said. "What has happened here is not right. It should not be that way."
