Bellevue Legal News: Seattle Divorce & Domestic Violence Lawyer

Children Can Live With Child Killer For Now, Judge Rules

Trisha Conlon received good news and bad news in the August 29, 2011 ruling of a Seattle child custody case that has gained national attention.

While King County Superior Court Judge William Downing ruled that Conlon's teenage sons can continue living with a woman who killed her own children, he also overturned a previous decision by a court commissioner, who ruled that the parenting plan did not need to be changed.

Judge's Downing's ruling requires that a court-appointed child advocate investigate on behalf of the children's interests and submit a report within 90 days. During the investigation, no change will be made to the residential arrangement. At the end of the investigation, the court will decide if the teenagers' residential schedules need modification.

Conlon, who divorced Marine fighter pilot Lt. Col. John P. Cushing Jr. in 2004, learned last spring that Kristine Cushing, the former wife of Conlon's ex-husband, had been living in Cushing's home with Conlon's sons. Her concerns about the living arrangement stemmed from Kristine Cushing's violent past.

In October 1991, Kristine shot and killed her 4- and 8-year old daughters as they slept in their home in Laguna Niguel, California. The killings were blamed on a bad reaction to Prozac, and Kristine was found not guilty by reason of insanity. She spent four years in a mental institution and was kept under psychiatric monitoring for almost a decade. In 2005, she received an unconditional release from the state of California, who concluded that she posed no risk. It was in that same year that she remarried John Cushing.

On July 25, 2011, a court commissioner determined that Kristine had been living in the home since 2005 and had not posed any risk to the two children. Therefore, he ruled that there was no reason to make a change to the parenting plan.

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