Thomas & Niki Araguz Photo Courtesy of Niki Araguz
By Brody Levesque (Bethesda, Maryland) OCT 23 | Thomas Araguz and his wife Niki were, by all accounts, a typical happy couple sharing their lives together in the small rural Texas town of Wharton located southwest of metropolitan Houston.Thomas was a volunteer firefighter with the local fire department and she had a small start-up magazine business and looked after his sons with whom he shared joint custody with former wife Heather Delgado four days a week. Then a series of events culminating in tragedy, turned their lives upside down and now has pitted a widow against her husband's family in a nasty court fight over his insurance benefits.
While on a trip to visit friends earlier this year, Niki Araguz received a phone call from another firefighter's wife that there had been a terrible accident and she need to come back immediately. In an interview with ABCNews, Niki recalled; "She said, 'You need to come home right now. They lost Thomas in a fire at 11 o'clock last night."
In a spectacular five alarm fire at a local egg farm, her husband had become separated from his teammates and was killed. The blaze was so intense that it had called for responses from nearly 30 neighboring fire departments. It took firefighters hours to combat the fire followed by a nearly 10 hour search to locate Araguz's body.
What happened next shocked the tiny community more than the death when it was revealed that Niki was born Justin Grahm Purdue, a man. Several months earlier, Araguz's former wife and he had become embroiled in a custody fight over their sons, which in the filed court documents, Delgado alleged she was being edged out by an intrusive attitude and actions by Niki. While digging into Niki's past, an attorney for Delgado discovered that she'd applied for a legal name change to Nikki Paige Purdue although her birth certificate still listed her as a male.
When Araguz's parents discovered this fact, they filed suit to prevent Niki from collecting his survivor's benefits totaling nearly one million dollars.
The lawsuit attempts to block Nikki Araguz from collecting her share of that money, alleging he never knew she was born male.
Under Texas law, gender is determined at birth and same sex marriage is not recognized, so according to the Araguz family attorneys, the person known as Nikki Araguz misrepresented herself and never should have been permitted to marry Thomas Araguz.
"In the most basic sense, the courts have said that you are what you're born as," said Chad Ellis, the attorney representing Thomas Araguz's mother, Simona Longoria. "In this case, Nikki was born male. So because Nikki is and always will be male in the state of Texas, the marriage is void as a matter of law."
Longoria insists her son was blindsided by the revelations that came out of the custody deposition. But Nikki Araguz argues just as passionately that she had no secrets from her husband and that this case is about basic civil rights.
"This is all about my husband being gone from me and the equal right of mine and Thomas to be married," she said. "That's what it's all about."
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1 comments:
So Nikki is 'male' under Texas law? She should test that by entering Man restrooms, joining male sports organizations, etc. The screams of fury by redneck guys would soon engulf those archaic laws and send them back into the fires of Hell from which they were spawned.
What seems to mark so many jurisdictions in the USA, and particularly Texas, is an abysmal ignorance, superseding only marginally their intolerance and lack of compassion.
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