Lawsuit
Now let me tell you all of the things I did for my brother before he decided to sue me and my sister for control over my grandmother's money. When I was debating moving to Arkansas I called my brother with the original intent to live with my grandmother. He is 7 years older so I thought I could trust his decision making when he told me I should move in with him instead. This was a manipulative ploy to try and get my disability income to pay his bills.
To this day Bryce believes any money I get is his. This goes back to childhood and as the years passed his mentality and approach never changed.
Only at the age of 30 have I taken action to not be controlled by him. Ever since the lawsuit he started I have refused to speak to him. After 1.5 years of not responding to him I gave him a chance to have me back in his life.
When I went to visit my grandmother at Comfort Care I saw a family photo of my brother, his wife Cynthia, and my niece and nephew and as I gazed on the image I felt guilt for ceasing all contact with him. I was in a state of confliction so I hit up my friend Cory asking him what I should do, that I saw myself as the bad guy in this scenario. Cory suggested I talk to Bryce again and apologize for not answering his call or texts, so after I was done feeding and visiting my grandmother I went to the liquor store to buy him a bottle of Fireball, his favorite whiskey.
I continued on to my brother's home with the Fireball and as I was driving towards his house he and my sister-in law had just left and so we passed each other on my way there. Originally I was just going to text him and drop it off on his porch but they swung around and as I was texting my brother he came up to my passenger side window, so I rolled it down, offered the Fireball as a "peace offering." When I asked him why he wouldn't allow us to move granny he argued that she was in her late eighties and she wasn't going to get any better so leave her at Comfort Care.
That was foolish and the wrong approach. Yes, I know she isn't going to get better, but in her final years she should be at a 5-star facility living a life of luxury not torment in accompanied by social isolation. I felt guilt and I began to tear up as I told him how bad I felt for not talking to him for several years, that was exactly what he wanted. After a short discussion he said he accepted the peace offering and we went about our ways.
I informed my brother that our grandmother had a doctor appointment the following week to which he decided to attend. He showed up late of course and was no help because he barely visited her so didn't know what she was going through and made no effort to understand, he was just there to play a role. At the end of the appointment I wheeled granny outside to wait for her ride, the weather was nice. After her transportation arrived my brother had one last statement to say to me. I told him "I'm sorry," to which he responded "you have to show Cynthia and myself you are sorry through action and maybe eventually we can be on good terms again."
When I told my sister that he was at the doc appointment and we talked she got mad at me and didn't talk to me for 3 days. I guess she felt betrayed because of how hellish Bryce has made our lives and most important his own grandmother's life as she was in a state of being non-communicability.
My second semester at Ohio St when I officially moved from Bennington to Rochester I would receive a call from my sister saying the all familiar saying in my family "you won't believe this." My brother had hired a lawyer and filed a lawsuit against me and her for control over my grandmother's million-dollar trust. When my grandmother and grandfather were competent they originally only left money in an inheritance to my sister, she was supposed to receive all of it, but my grandmother amended it after my grandfather died to where all three grandchildren receive the inheritance. This was a mistake that would give Bryce the chance to essentially ruin all of our lives.
Aside from being the sole beneficiary to the trust, my sister was given power and control over my grandmother's care and she did a great fucking job. My grandmother got her hair done every week, nails done, medication, doctor and dentist appointments as well as comfort items like weighted blankets and every holiday I would get decorations from my sister and design my grandmother's room at Comfort Care.
Once my brother started the lawsuit he took away my sister's ability to touch the money so our grandmother would proceed to suffer. Her medication bill at Evan's pharmacy would go unpaid and climb to their limit of $300 before my sister had to intervene and pay the bill from her own money before they cut our grandma off leaving her completely without medication. Her hairstylist bill would follow the same course of racking up a $200 bill before the stylist quit providing her service.
After Bryce started the lawsuit if my grandmother needed anything my sister paid for it out of her pocket. The lawyers said she would be reimbursed but even after my grandmother's death she still hasn't received repayment for everything. The thing is, my brother not once offered to help pay for my grandmother's care, he didn't care if she went without medication as long as it meant more money for him to inherit. I would say aside from our childhood; 15 years of alcohol abuse has done quite the number on his mind but he has always been selfish from youth to adulthood. I don't believe he perceives his actions as wrong, for some reason he is always the victim.
Anyways so my brother starts the lawsuit and at that point I decided not to respond or talk to him because aside from starting the lawsuit he tried to have me be deemed incompetent and destroyed my reputation and name to the lawyers. I literally have given him no reason to not like me. I mowed his lawn every two weeks in the summer for 2 years, I even paid for and brought the gas and mower myself. I would bring him lunch to work every day which I also paid for. If he would ask me to get him a can of dip, I would get him 2. I gave him $60 every holiday. I changed his tire 3 times, replaced his doorknob and changed one out. He had a pile of metal and 50 bolts which was three pieces of gym equipment taken art, I spent hours putting it all together on my own, he was in the living room getting drunk. When they bought a new car and said something about difficulty making payments and such I gave them an envelope with $1,000 in it, this comes into play because one and a half years later when I needed roughly $1,000 for summer school he actively tried to keep me from getting money from the trust to finish my education. So even though I paid for his food, dip, drugs, alcohol, scratch tickets, thousands of dollars he wanted me to be barred from getting the trust to pay for summer school.
I don't think he understands if I had not helped him out I wouldn't have needed money from the trust. I got off their phone plan after the lawsuit because I didn't want to lose my phone by them and I couldn't afford to keep paying so much extra, I had paid over $400 more than my cost for a phone on their bill yet my brother kept the bill $700 behind. It is as if he expected me to pay for his entire family's phone bill. So anyways with the help of my sister I got a new phone but I ran into a problem when trying to get off my brother's plan, the problem of course was his wife. In order to change phone plans I needed the code for their internet and cable account. Cynthia would refuse to give me the code and when I offered her every reason to make it easier as in giving her my laptop and going outside while she entered the code, she still refused until finally I don't know why, she gave it to me.
In 2018 I had pad for a game for my nephew on his tablet using my creditcard so the info was saved. When I was in Rochester, Bryce would use my credit card 6 times for an amazon subscription. When I caught wind of this I worked to get my money refunded and all of it was between amazon and the card company aside from two transactions totaling $20. When I told my brother I had found out about Tommy using my card I expected him to pay me back, but his wife Cynthia would fight tooth and nail to claim they didn't use it, even when I sent her screenshots of the transactions.
My brother refused to y me back the $20 because he claimed he had just paid bills and was broke. My brother would say things like this to make me pay and to get access to my money when he was sitting comfortably. What angered me is he had money in robinhood the investing app, but he didn't want to use that to pay me back. If the situation were flipped and I had used his credit card for $20 I would pay back that and extra not lie about being broke.
After I had already moved out of my brother's house he claimed I owed him extra money for the water bill because it was high due to me showering daily. The real reason was he failed at filling up a pool halfway, dumped it out, then refilled the pool again. Either he was delusional or manipulating me he claimed that the pools had nothing to do with the water bill and I owed him that the bill was $400. So I gave him all of my first paycheck it was $200 and all he did was claim I needed to pay the rest. He had already taken a third of my disability income as rent so that was over $350 I gave him. Regardless this was just a trend from youth that would continue into adulthood where Bryce believes anything and everything that is mine is his first.