Rhode Island Judge Rules for Widowed Father in Landmark Grandparents' Visitation Case
On April 23, 2026 — one day before the two-year anniversary of his wife's death — Scott Naso stood in a Kent County Family Court and wept as Judge Felix Gill dismissed a petition that had consumed nearly two years of his life, cost him more than $500,000, and forced him to defend his fitness as a father while grieving the woman he loved. The ruling, reported by the Boston Globe, closes one of the most emotionally layered grandparents' rights cases in recent Rhode Island memory — one that touched on parental autonomy, alleged medical malpractice within a family, a secret recording, and the collision between grief and legal strategy.
The case is a window into a rarely examined corner of family law: what happens when a child's grandparents believe they have a right to be part of her life, and her surviving parent disagrees? The answer, at least in Rhode Island in 2026, is that the parent wins — but the price of winning can be staggering.
The Family at the Center of the Case
Scott and Shahrzad "Sherry" Naso married in September 2020. Sherry, a woman whose parents — Dr. Siavash Ghoreishi and Dr. Jila Khorsand — are both physicians, had been living with breast cancer since her 2017 diagnosis. Despite that prognosis, Scott and Sherry built a family together; their daughter Laila was born via surrogate in 2021. The couple had years of medical uncertainty woven into their marriage from the start.
Sherry's cancer metastasized, and she died in April 2024. Laila was three years old. Scott, a narcotics detective with the Middletown Police Department, became a single father overnight. His in-laws — Ghoreishi, a pediatrician, and Khorsand, a pathologist — wanted to remain in Laila's life. Scott said no. Three months after burying his wife, he found himself in Family Court.
How Rhode Island Grandparents' Rights Law Works — and Why It Matters Here
Most Americans assume that parental rights are nearly absolute when it comes to decisions about a child's relationships. In most circumstances, they are. But nearly every state has carved out some statutory exceptions allowing grandparents to petition courts for visitation — particularly when a parent has died or when parents have divorced.
Rhode Island is among those states. The grandparents invoked a little-known provision that permits grandparents whose child has died to petition Family Court for visitation rights with their grandchild. The legal threshold, however, is not simply proving that visits would benefit the child. Courts applying this law must also find that the surviving parent's refusal to allow visitation is unreasonable — a higher bar than many grandparents and their attorneys anticipate.
Judge Gill acknowledged directly that visits between Laila and her maternal grandparents would likely benefit the child. That concession makes the ruling more striking, not less. He dismissed the case anyway, because the grandparents failed to prove that Scott Naso's refusal was unreasonable under the law. The distinction is the entire ballgame in grandparents' rights litigation: a court can believe visits would be good for a child and still rule for the parent, if the parent's reasons for saying no are not found to be arbitrary or harmful.
The Secret Recording That Became a Fatal Flaw
The most damaging element of the grandparents' case was, paradoxically, evidence they themselves introduced. In June 2024 — about two months after Sherry's death — a family friend named Lili Bahrami spent nearly three hours with Scott Naso. During that visit, Bahrami secretly recorded the conversation. The grandparents obtained the recording and submitted it as evidence in their favor.
It backfired.
In the recording, Scott spoke candidly about his grievances: he believed his in-laws' medical care had contributed to Sherry's death. He alleged that Dr. Ghoreishi had written more than 36 prescriptions for Laila before she turned three years old. He said he feared the grandparents' true goal was to build a case making him appear to be an unfit parent. The recording did not reveal a father consumed by irrational hostility toward his late wife's family. It revealed a man with specific, documented concerns — concerns a court could evaluate on their merits.
When the judge weighed the evidence, the recording the grandparents hoped would expose Scott's unreasonableness instead corroborated his stated reasons for denying access. The "fatal flaw," as the ruling characterized it, was that the secret recording did not show irrational animus — it showed a father with articulable, if disputed, fears about his daughter's safety and welfare.
The Munchausen by Proxy Accusation and the Medical Licenses
Scott Naso's concerns were not limited to a private conversation. In January 2025, he filed a formal complaint with the Rhode Island Department of Health accusing both grandparents of Munchausen syndrome by proxy — now clinically termed factitious disorder imposed on another (FDIA) — alleging they had applied this pattern of behavior toward both Sherry and Laila.
Munchausen by proxy is among the most serious allegations that can be made against a caregiver. It describes a pattern in which a caregiver — often someone with medical knowledge — fabricates or induces illness in a person under their care to attract medical attention and sympathy. The alleged prescription pattern for Laila (36-plus prescriptions before age three) formed a central part of Scott's concern.
Separately, both Dr. Ghoreishi and Dr. Khorsand relinquished their medical licenses shortly after Sherry's death. The timing of those surrenders drew scrutiny throughout the trial. The grandparents have not publicly confirmed the reasons for relinquishing their licenses, and the Rhode Island Department of Health complaint outcome was not resolved publicly before the trial concluded.
Whether or not Scott's FDIA complaint ultimately results in findings against the grandparents, the existence of that complaint — and the documented prescription volume for Laila — gave the court concrete reasons to understand why a reasonable parent might deny access. That is precisely the legal threshold Scott needed to meet.
The Human Cost: $500,000 and a Father Who Couldn't Be Present
Coverage of the ruling emphasized a detail that deserves to stand alone: Scott Naso spent more than $500,000 in legal fees defending his right to make decisions about his daughter's life. He is a police detective, not a wealthy man by most standards. The trial ran for 18 days beginning in October 2025, with the grandparents resting their case on April 22, 2026, the day before the ruling came down.
During proceedings, Scott made a statement that resonated widely with those following the case: "I want to spend time with my daughter, but I am in court." The line captures something that gets lost in the legal proceduralism of family court cases. The person asserting parental rights is not a statistic in a brief. He is a widower who spent the first two years after his wife's death in depositions, testimony, and attorney meetings rather than building a childhood with his daughter.
The grandparents' attorney, Michael Ahn, is expected to file an appeal. That means Scott Naso's legal fight is likely not over, even as the courtroom door closes on this round.
What This Case Reveals About Grandparents' Rights Law in America
The Rhode Island ruling lands at an interesting moment in the national conversation about grandparents' rights. The legal landscape shifted significantly after the U.S. Supreme Court's 2000 decision in Troxel v. Granville, which established that fit parents have a constitutionally protected right to make decisions about their children's upbringing — including whom their children associate with. Troxel did not eliminate grandparents' rights statutes, but it imposed a requirement that courts give "special weight" to a fit parent's decisions.
The Naso case illustrates how that framework plays out in practice. Judge Gill could not simply decide that grandparent-grandchild contact serves the child's interests (it usually does) and order it. He had to evaluate whether the parent's contrary decision was the decision of a fit parent acting within reason. The grandparents' own evidence — the prescription records, the secret recording, the relinquished medical licenses, the FDIA complaint — collectively made it harder, not easier, to characterize Scott's refusal as the arbitrary act of a grieving man cutting off his daughter's family out of spite.
Pre-ruling coverage in the Boston Globe noted that the grandparents had built their case largely around the argument that Laila has a meaningful relationship with her maternal grandparents and that severing it would harm her development. That argument — while sympathetic — does not answer the legal question Rhode Island's statute actually asks. The question is not whether visits are good. It is whether withholding them is wrong.
Analysis: Why This Ruling Will Be Cited — and Contested
Judge Gill's decision matters beyond the Naso family for several reasons. It is a clean, recent application of Rhode Island's grandparents' rights statute in a case involving a deceased parent — the exact circumstance the law was written to address. The ruling draws a clear line: even where a court believes visits would benefit a child, the surviving parent's reasonable objection defeats the petition.
That clarity is valuable. It gives future litigants and attorneys a concrete framework. But it will also be contested, because it exposes the uncomfortable truth that "reasonable" is doing enormous work in this legal standard. What Scott Naso believed about his in-laws' medical conduct was, to him, entirely reasonable. The judge agreed. Another judge, evaluating similar facts differently, might not. The subjectivity baked into "unreasonableness" review means cases like this will continue to be decided on their specific facts, and outcomes will not always be predictable.
The case also raises a harder question about the cost of parental rights litigation. A $500,000 legal bill to assert a constitutional right that courts are supposed to protect with "special weight" suggests that the legal process itself has become a burden that falls unequally. Most single parents could not have mounted the defense Scott Naso did. The ruling is correct on the law. The pathway to getting there deserves scrutiny.
"The judge acknowledged visits would benefit the child but found the grandparents failed to prove Naso's decision to deny access was unreasonable under state law."
Frequently Asked Questions
Can grandparents legally force visitation with a grandchild in Rhode Island?
Rhode Island law allows grandparents to petition Family Court for visitation in specific circumstances — including when their own child (the grandchild's parent) has died or divorced. However, petitioning is not the same as winning. Courts must find not only that visits would benefit the child, but that the surviving or custodial parent's refusal is unreasonable. As the Naso case demonstrates, meeting that two-part threshold is difficult when the opposing parent has articulable, documented reasons for their decision.
What is Munchausen syndrome by proxy, and why did it come up in this case?
Munchausen syndrome by proxy — clinically called factitious disorder imposed on another (FDIA) — describes a pattern in which a caregiver fabricates or induces illness in someone under their care, often to gain medical attention. Scott Naso filed a complaint with the Rhode Island Department of Health in January 2025 alleging this pattern against both grandparents, citing among other evidence that the grandfather (a pediatrician) allegedly wrote more than 36 prescriptions for Laila before she turned three. The allegation informed the court's evaluation of whether Scott's fears were reasonable, even if the DOH complaint has not been publicly resolved.
Why did the secret recording hurt the grandparents' case?
The grandparents submitted a recording made secretly by a mutual acquaintance during a three-hour conversation with Scott Naso in June 2024. They apparently believed the recording would reveal unreasonable hostility or irrational thinking on Scott's part. Instead, it documented specific, coherent concerns: beliefs about the grandparents' role in Sherry's medical care, worries about excessive prescriptions for Laila, and fears that the grandparents were attempting to build a case against him as a parent. The recording gave the judge reason to conclude that Scott's position was grounded, not arbitrary — the opposite of what the grandparents needed to prove.
Will the grandparents appeal, and what are their chances?
Scott Naso's attorney has indicated that the grandparents' lawyer, Michael Ahn, is expected to file an appeal. Appeals in family court visitation cases face a high bar: appellate courts generally defer to trial judges on factual findings and review legal questions de novo. The grandparents would need to identify either a legal error in how Judge Gill applied the statute or a factual finding so clearly against the evidence that it warrants reversal. Given that the judge explicitly acknowledged that visits would benefit the child — and still ruled for the father — an appeal will likely focus on whether the "unreasonableness" standard was applied correctly.
How does the Supreme Court's Troxel decision affect cases like this?
In Troxel v. Granville (2000), the U.S. Supreme Court held that fit parents have a fundamental constitutional right to make decisions about the care, custody, and control of their children, and that courts must give "special weight" to a fit parent's objections to third-party visitation. That ruling did not eliminate grandparents' rights laws, but it significantly raised the bar grandparents must clear to override a parent's decision. Rhode Island's statute reflects this framework by requiring proof that the parent's refusal is "unreasonable" — a standard designed to respect parental authority while leaving open a safety valve for cases of genuine harm to the child.
Conclusion: A Case That Ends and a Debate That Doesn't
The dismissal of the Ghoreishi-Khorsand petition on April 23, 2026, gives Scott Naso a legal victory on the one-year anniversary of when this trial consumed him. It restores to him the simple legal recognition that he, as Laila's fit and surviving parent, gets to decide who is in his daughter's life. Judge Gill's ruling was not a finding that the grandparents are bad people or that Laila would be harmed by knowing them. It was a finding that the law does not permit courts to override a fit parent's reasonable decision, even when reasonable people might disagree with that decision.
The broader story — a grieving family torn apart by illness, suspicion, medical allegations, and competing versions of what Sherry would have wanted — will not be resolved by any court. The Naso case will become a footnote in Rhode Island family law, cited by attorneys arguing about the scope of grandparents' rights in future proceedings. For Scott and Laila, it will be something else entirely: the years of a childhood spent in the shadow of a courtroom, finally handed back.
An appeal is expected. The legal chapter may not be finished. But for one day in April 2026, a father cried in a courtroom — and for once, they were tears of relief.
