I was served on the church steps at my mother’s funeral. My brother had filed eleven days before she died. The stamp on the first page was October 14th. She passed on the 25th. He’d sat in her room on the 20th, held her hand, and told her he’d take care of everything. But his own petition says she was incompetent when she signed the 2021 amendment. He supported that claim with an affidavit from himself—and in that affidavit he stated he wasn’t present when she signed.
The notary log said otherwise. My brother had signed the visitor sheet at 9:52 that morning, and the document was executed at 10:15. He was in the building. He was in the room. His own affidavit said he wasn’t. Her attorney found the log in about forty minutes. I called my sister to tell her, expecting her to be shocked. Instead, she went completely quiet and asked me to send her a photograph of the page.
She called me back that evening. She had found something else in Mom’s file: the attorney’s notes from that morning. They said Mom had asked my brother to leave the room before she discussed the amendment, and the notary had specifically recorded that Mom appeared alert and understood what she was signing. Then the attorney found a second document—one my brother hadn’t mentioned. It was a handwritten note Mom had made two days before the signing, explaining why she was changing the arrangement and naming the people she wanted protected.
My brother’s attorney withdrew the affidavit three days later and asked for a continuance. But by then the contradiction was already in the court record. At the hearing, the judge asked my brother why he had sworn he wasn’t present when the visitor log placed him inside the room thirteen minutes before the document was signed. He said he had “forgotten the timing.” Then the judge asked why Mom’s attorney had written that he was specifically asked to leave. My brother didn’t answer. He just looked down at the table. And the next thing the judge said was, “Then perhaps we should discuss what else in this petition you remember differently.”
