A new will signed in the final weeks of Randy Driscoll’s life gave his family farm to the local Catholic church. Reports the Star Tribune….
When her husband’s will was read, Cindy Driscoll immediately thought something was wrong — because it said nothing about caring for Randy Driscoll’s beloved parrot, Beeker. But the biggest surprise was yet to come.
The 62-year-old East Grand Forks, Minn., farmer had left virtually his entire estate, totaling more than $5 million, to the foundation of Sacred Heart Catholic Church — a church the Driscolls didn’t attend. Included were 500 acres of prime Red River Valley farmland that had been in the Driscoll family since the late 1800s.
And then Cindy Driscoll learned something that disturbed her even more: The lawyer who wrote a new will for her husband in the weeks before he died was the registered agent for, and a board member of, the Sacred Heart Foundation, which stood to get the money.
“I was just stunned,” she recalled. “I said, ‘Something has gone terribly wrong here.’ Never would Randy have done this to the family or me.
“There’s no way he would have left everything to the church.”
Now Driscoll is suing East Grand Forks attorney Gerard Neil and his law firm in Polk County District Court, alleging malpractice, negligence and fraudulent misrepresentation.