04/19/2025
Family Law Tip of the Day: Put all the anger for your ex behind you and think of your kids! That seems to be the theme of my day.
As I am reading an article on FSU, I am reminded why it is important to think of how your actions affect your children. Sometimes as parents we get selfish with wanting to hurt the other parent or wanting more time with our child or wanting what is best for us and we forget that we are putting a tiny impressionable person in the middle. I am pasting the article I was reading below and realizing just how many of the cases which I have represented are similar to this young man's history; a part of me thinks but for the grace of God it could have been one of my clients who is suffering as the parent of a child that did this and sitting up at night wondering if it was something he or she did.... To be clear, I am not blaming his parents, I am just saying that there is a probability that their bitter divorce helped to shape the adult he became and it is a sad situation.
Hug your kids and have a Happy Easter!
Suspect was subject of tumultuous custody battle:
Phoenix Ikner was born in August 2004 in Tallahassee, and was named Christian Eriksen for most of his childhood. At age 15, he changed his name to “Phoenix” because “he sees himself as a phoenix, rising from the ashes with renewed youth and life,” according to a judge’s description of his testimony.
Leon County court records – which span nearly 17 years from the time Phoenix Ikner was 2 years old until he was 19 – detail acrimonious allegations between his parents, Christopher Ikner, an American, and Anne-Mari Eriksen, a dual Norwegian American citizen.
One court filing by the biological mother characterizes the child, then 10 years old, as being “in the middle of a war.” She was prosecuted for violating a custody agreement in 2015 by taking him out of the country.
Neither of the suspect’s parents responded to requests for comment from CNN Thursday and Friday.
While the parents initially agreed to share custody in 2007, Christopher Ikner moved to modify the custody agreement when Phoenix Ikner was five, claiming that his son’s mother had left him in “deplorable” hygiene and failed to keep up with his speech therapy. Anne-Mari Eriksen denied those allegations in court documents, writing that Phoenix Ikner had been dealing with health issues.
Over the next few years, the parents traded allegations that they were harassing each other or neglecting their care of their son. The disputes came to a head in March 2015, when Eriksen took custody of the then 10-year-old during spring break.
According to allegations filed by Christopher Ikner in a later petition, Phoenix Ikner told his father he thought his biological mother was taking him to Disney World for spring break, but instead Eriksen took him to an airport and flew to Norway.
A Norwegian court ordered Phoenix Ikner to be returned to Florida in June 2015, and Christopher Ikner and his wife Jessica came to Norway to get the child. The father wrote that he was “assisted by police in Norway to find and take custody” of his son, returning to the US the following month.
Back in the US, Eriksen was charged with removing a minor from the state against a court order. She pleaded no contest to the charge, and was sentenced to 200 days in jail, followed by two years of “community control” and then two years of probation, according to court records. She was ordered to have no contact during her sentence with her son or any of his teachers, doctors or counselors, unless allowed by a court.
In February 2017, a judge granted Christopher Ikner sole parental responsibility.
During a June 2020 hearing on Phoenix Ikner’s name change, a magistrate judge in the case described him as “a mentally, emotionally, and physically mature young adult, who was very articulate, quite intelligent, very well spoken, and very polite.” The judge also said he’s an “honor roll student” who “came to the hearing dressed in his NJROTC uniform.”
His former name, the judge wrote, was “a constant reminder of the 2015 tragedy he suffered through” – an apparent reference to the Norway incident – “and of his mother who he has not seen or spoken to since 2015.” Ikner had attended counseling to “help him cope with these past events,” the judge wrote.
For the last decade, according to the records, Phoenix Ikner has been raised by his father, who is married to the Leon County sheriff’s deputy. His biological mother wrote in a 2023 court document that she had not seen her son in eight years.
But just after the shooting, the biological mother posted on Facebook complaining that her son’s dad hadn’t responded when she wrote “to ask if everything is alright with my son, who studies at FSU.”
