Grandparents locked in custody fight over daughter of late Kansas City Chief's linebacker Jovan Belcher
This is Four-month-old Zoey Michelle Belcher
It’s a tug-of-war over a $3 million baby.
The grandparents of 4-month-old Zoey Belcher have been locked in a bitter custody dispute since the infant’s football star father killed the mother, then himself, in a stunning murder-suicide last month.
Little Zoey could be heard wailing in the background on 911 tapes released immediately after her father, Kansas City Chiefs linebacker Jovan Belcher, shot her mother, Kasandra Perkins, in cold blood. Belcher’s mother, Cheryl Shepherd — who was also living in their rented $4.7 million Kansas City, Mo., home — made the call.
The families of Belcher and Perkins are now in a heated custody war over Zoe.
Then Belcher, 25, who first made his mark playing for West Babylon High School, killed himself with a bullet to the head.
The Kansas City police awarded temporary custody to Shepherd in the immediate aftermath of the bloodshed. But Shepherd claims she then sent little Zoey to the maternal family in Texas for a short stay to attend her slain 22-year-old mother’s funeral — and hasn’t seen or heard from them since.
“The maternal relatives have now ceased communicating with Cheryl Shepherd and have refused to return her calls or return the child to her care,” Shepherd’s lawyer, Gretchen Gold, wrote a Missouri probate commissioner last Thursday in court filings obtained by several news sources.
Gold claimed maternal grandmother Rebecca Gonzalez was well aware Shepherd was preparing to file a petition for guardianship of Zoey out of Kansas City. So Gonzalez, who lives in Fort Worth, beat her to the punch and filed one day earlier in Texas.
In the Dec. 13 filing, Gonzalez’s attorney noted that Belcher “murdered the child subject’s mother . . . in the presence of the child.”
Feelings toward Belcher’s side of the family are no warmer at the maternal grandfather’s home in Austin, Tex. “My granddaughter wasn’t a murderer; he was the murderer,” a woman, who declined to give her name, told The News.
Asked about the fight over Zoey, she said, “All of it sounds like lies.”
Rebecca Gonzalez, mother of Perkins, wants to raise Zoe in her Fort Worth, Texas home.
“You should call people in New York,” the Austin woman bitterly added, referring to Shepherd’s kin, who live in Long Island. “I’m sure they’ll have a lot to say.”
A probate commissioner has scheduled a Jan. 11 court date in Independence, Mo., to hear Shepherd’s petition seeking full custody of Zoey, and a second petition seeking appointment as administrator of her son’s multimillion-dollar estate.
THIS IS ALL SO SAD!
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