Case could spur grandparents' rights legislation

Grandparents seeking custody of granddaughter after daughter's death

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By Lou Grieco and Mary McCarty Staff Writers Updated 1:41 PM Saturday, August 7, 2010

Rebecca Arrowood dropped her 8-year-old daughter Kayla off at 5:30 a.m. at her parents’ home in Jefferson Twp. That’s what the 28-year-old single mother always did on the days that she worked as a nursing home aide — a job she loved, even though she worried that she couldn’t give her daughter all the material things she needed.

“You love her, and that’s the most important thing,” her mother, Valerie Arrowood, would console her.

Valerie slept in that morning, a lazy Sunday, while Kayla watched cartoons. Around 8 a.m. her husband, Charles, came into the bedroom with tears in his eyes. “My husband never cries,” Valerie said, so she knew something was terribly wrong — a premonition confirmed by the presence of the state trooper at the front door. “He showed me Rebecca’s driver’s license, and I said that was my daughter, and he informed me that she was dead,” Valerie recalled.

The details would emerge later: Arrowood’s Pontiac Bonneville had been hit head on by a Mercury Cougar traveling the wrong way on the flyover ramp from southbound Interstate 75 to northbound Interstate 675. The Mercury driver, 38-year-old Michelle Sharp of Cincinnati, was driving with an unsealed bottle of vodka in the car. Both women were killed instantly. Arrowood, who was wearing a seatbelt, was minutes away from her job at Brighton Gardens Senior Living on Paragon Road. “I worried about her in the winter time, but I never thought about a beautiful sunny Sunday morning,” Valerie said.

Kayla followed her grandmother out to the porch, and listened as the state trooper’s devastating news, but “she didn’t really understand at first,” Valerie said. “I just tried to explain it as best I could — that her Mommy had gone to be with Jesus. She didn’t believe me. In her child’s mind, she would look for her Mommy’s car when we turned down the street. She asked, ‘When is Mommy coming back?’”

The rest of the day went by in a blur, with calls pouring in from friends and family. Around 11 p.m., Valerie received a call that she didn’t expect — from her former son-in-law, James Oakley, whom she hadn’t seen in more than five years. He asked if he could come to Rebecca’s services, and she consented, thinking it would be good for Kayla to reconnect with her father. “It’s in my nature to give everyone the benefit of the doubt,” she explained.

Two days later, just hours after Rebecca’s funeral, she received another late-night call from Oakley, asking to resume visitation with Kayla. “Jimmy, I don’t have a problem with that, if you could just give us a week or so to get ourselves together,” Valerie said.

‘Where is my Daddy, why doesn’t he come around?’

After Rebecca separated from Oakley in 2003, she and Kayla moved in with her parents for six years before renting an apartment in New Lebanon last year. Her grandparents still babysat Kayla every day, and the family usually had dinner together. “The last couple of years, Kayla asked the typical questions: ‘Where is my Daddy, why doesn’t he come around?’” Valerie recalled. “We always told her that we didn’t really know why. That was his choice.”

The Arrowoods said Oakley exercised his visitation rights sporadically for about two years, “but even at the beginning he didn’t always show up when he was supposed to,” Valerie recalled. “After about two years, he just stopped coming.”

In March, Oakley and his wife, Amanda, left a letter in their mailbox asking to resume visitation with Kayla, according to the Arrowoods. They said Rebecca agreed to the request but nothing came of it.

The Arrowoods continued to believe that Oakley should be part of Kayla’s life, especially after she lost her mother, but the timing of his call unsettled them. “We had just buried our daughter, and to be truthful, we were having a very hard time of it, and Kayla was having a hard time,” Valerie said.

Kayla seemed better the following week, though she didn’t let her grandparents out of her sight. “She couldn’t quite grasp that her Mommy wasn’t there any more, but we had always been there for her, and she knew we would always be there for her. She still had us and she clung to us that much tighter.”

Oakley’s reappearance made her nervous, Valerie acknowledged: “After losing my daughter, my biggest fear was that he was going to take Kayla.” The couple hired a lawyer, Doug Brannon, but didn’t believe any custody attempt was imminent until June 8, when Kayla announced, “Mamaw, a police officer is at the door.”

Valerie panicked, fearing something had happened to her husband or surviving daughter, Nicole, Rebecca’s identical twin. Instead the officer presented a court order for the Arrowoods to turn Kayla over to her father. “Kayla didn’t seem upset,” Valerie recalled, “but I’m sure she thought she was going to visit that day and come back.”

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