Teenager Fights to Divorce Dad

Boy, 14, Wants to Cut Ties With the Man Who Killed His Mother

BOSTON -- It was almost six years ago that Patrick Holland kissed his mother good night for the last time and went to bed in a room with Sesame Street curtains and Power Ranger dolls.

Hours later, while the 8-year-old slept, his father smashed through a downstairs window of the Quincy, Mass., home, beat Elizabeth Holland with the butt of a .22-caliber rifle and shot her dead.

"I was wondering why my mom hadn't woken me up for school," Patrick, now 14, wrote in January on a Web site established as a memorial to his mother. When he entered her room, he wrote, he saw her "bloody, beaten body."

"I was in shock," he continued. "I tried to wake her up."

Monday the teenager will ask a Massachusetts judge to terminate his father's parental rights -- the rough legal equivalent of a divorce -- in a case with few precedents that could be decided this week.

Daniel Holland is serving a life sentence for murder in a Shirley, Mass., prison. But as far as Patrick is concerned, his father is still too involved in his life. Holland occasionally requests information from Patrick's counselors and seeks updates on his son's grades and baseball games, which permanent guardians Ron and Rita Lazisky say they are legally obligated to provide.

The Laziskys, who were Patrick's mother's close friends, agreed in a custody settlement with his grandparents not to adopt Patrick before 2005. Holland's parental rights must be severed for the adoption to go through.

"It would mean a lot to us but mostly to Patrick to be able to cut that off completely," said Ron Lazisky, in whose Sandown, N.H., home the boy has lived for five years. "He needs this for his emotional closure."

At the request of lawyers for both Patrick and his father, the trial will be closed to the public. Lazisky declined to make Patrick available to be interviewed for this story, citing a request from the teenager's attorney, Brian Clerkin, that he not speak to the media so close to the trial.

Neither Clerkin nor Daniel Holland's lawyer Patricia Gorman returned repeated telephone calls last week.

The case is unusual because Patrick, and not his guardians, is petitioning to sever ties with his biological father. "It is a very important case because it represents the concept that children should have a say in important legal matters affecting them," said Howard Davidson, director of the American Bar Association Center on Children and the Law.

He said the court would look at two legal criteria: whether grounds for termination were established by "clear and convincing evidence" and whether termination of Holland's parental rights is in Patrick's best interest.

Unlike some states, Massachusetts does not have a statute that requires termination of parental rights in the case of a domestic murder. Denise Monteiro, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Social Services, which is a party to Patrick's petition, said she is aware of only a few cases in which a child had sued to sever ties with a parent.

In trials in 1992 and 1993, two Florida children terminated the rights of their parents. One of the cases, involving Gregory Kingsley, who was 12 years old at the time, was overturned on appeal.