Mulvey v. Palo

Citations

• 226 Conn. App. 495

Syllabus

The plaintiff sought a declaratory judgment of adverse possession with respect to a portion of certain real property owned by the defendants. The defendants filed a counterclaim in which they sought to quiet title to the disputed portion of their property. At trial, the plaintiff submitted into evidence a general location survey prepared by R, a licensed land surveyor, which identified a wooded area and a lawn area on the disputed property. Other evidence at trial established that there was a third area on the disputed property, generally referred to as the muddy area, which straddled the wooded area and the lawn area. The trial court rendered judgment for the defendants. On the plaintiff's appeal to this court, held: 1. The plaintiff could not prevail on her claim that the trial court erroneously concluded that she failed to establish her claim of adverse possession with respect to all areas of the disputed property: although the court found that the plaintiff's late husband, S, had previously demonstrated possession of some areas on the disputed property, the court expressly found that no activities of any consequence occurred in the muddy area, and that finding was supported by the evidence in the record; moreover, there was no evidence that any member of the plaintiff's family posted signs or installed fencing on the disputed property generally or the muddy area specifically, the plaintiff's son, J, testified that S had not maintained the existing stone walls that abutted and intersected the disputed property, and the general survey prepared by R identified only two of the three areas of the disputed property; furthermore, although the court found that S created an access path on the disputed property, it did not find that that path traversed the muddy area, J did not identify the location of that path with any precision in his testimony, and he admitted that the path no longer existed, that he never took any measure- ments to determine its location, and that he