A custody fight gone crazy

Everybody in Grady knew Ruth White-Kitchen and her boys. But then, everybody knows everybody in Grady, a dusty speck of a ranching community, population around 100, on New Mexico’s eastern plains. Here, neighbors are tightknit though their homes may be miles apart. So when White-Kitchen was diagnosed with cancer in 2006, the community embraced her boys, Adrian Lunsford, then 8, and Adam Lunsford, then 10, to make sure they knew they would always have a home in Grady. And when she died Jan. 25, 2012, at age 52, thus began an unusual custody battle for the boys that pitted the rights of a parent with the wishes of children and exemplified how sometimes the law can’t always make things right. White-Kitchen had grown up in Grady and married Cliff Lunsford. The couple had five sons, including Adam and Adrian, their two youngest. The family lived in Pilot Point, Texas, a suburban town less than a hour’s drive from Dallas and about 450 miles east and a world away from Grady. When the marriage soured in 2002, White-Kitchen packed up her youngest boys and returned to Grady. By all accounts, the boys – smart, athletic and “yes ma’am” polite – thrived in Grady. Both were stars on the schools’ basketball teams. Adam was the salutatorian of his high school class; Adrian was valedictorian of his middle school class. The boys spent summer and holiday vacations in Pilot Point with their father, often working side by side with him in the mechanic shop he owns. Things might have stayed as pleasantly as that had White-Kitchen not passed away. It was her dying wish for the boys to remain in Grady, if they chose to, said attorney Richard Queener of Clovis...more