Found an issue on this page? Let us know and we will look into it as soon as possible.
Do I need to evict my dead mothers boyfriend from my 5th wheel
Anonymous9 views4 answers
My mom just died in January this year and her boyfriend is still in the trailer and its in my name parked at a campground so do I need to evict him or can I just hook up to it and go
You should probably file an eviction proceeding first. If you hook it up and go, you have to deal with all his stuff and you may be stealing it if you dont get a court order. Be ware, there are statutes that dont allow you to take possession of his personal items, and you may be required to put them in storage.
Review the Landlord-Tenant statues on what is required to evict an individual. It may serve you well to speak to an attorney about your options. This will help you avoid not following the statutes and then having to start all over. Good luck.
Just because the trailer is in your name does not necessarily mean that the trailer is legally yours.
Perhaps your mother used your name because she had reasons not to put the trailer under her name even though she bought the trailer.
If your mother and the boyfriend had been living with each other like spouses for several years, they may have what WA courts call a committed intimate relationship. That is, even they are not spouses of each other, they have property rights in properties that would have been community properties had they been married with each other.
If they had a CIR, half of what you think belongs to your mother legally belongs to the boyfriend. If your mother left a will, perhaps she gave the boyfriend even more of her belongings.
What you should do is review the specific facts with your attorney. The boyfriend may have more rights than you think.
I agree with the other attorney answers in most respects. The boyfriend may be considered your Mom's "committed intimate partner," and Washington law gives such individuals some rights. When those folks are separated by death, Washington treats it like a post-mortem divorce. In other words, he won't have normal intestate succession rights, (assuming your Mom left no Will), but he would have rights. You should talk with an attorney concerning the actual facts, and seek somebody who has both divorce/family law experience AND probate experience. You posted this as a probate question, which I think is correct, and analysis under Landlord/Tenant law (evictions) is probably not the issue here, unless your Mom was charging him rent (which sounds doubtful). You need to figure out who would get this asset if Mom was alive and they split up and went to court over it. You step into Mom's shoes, and usually the courts go for an "equitable division of assets" between committed intimate partners. More facts are needed to know what that looks like in this situation.