Kwankam v. Kenya Airways, Ltd. ( 2021 )

2021 IL App (1st) 200514-UFIRST DIVISION
February 16, 2021
No. 1-20-0514
NOTICE: This order was filed under Supreme Court Rule 23 and is not precedent except in the
limited circumstances allowed under Rule 23(e)(1).
IN THE
APPELLATE COURT OF ILLINOIS
FIRST DISTRICT
MAUREEN MARY YUNKAP KWANKAM and )
CONRAD F. NJAMFA, Co-Special Administrators of )
the Estate of Patrick Knamfa Njamfa, deceased, )
)
Plaintiffs, ) Appeal from the
) Circuit Court of
v. ) Cook County
)
KENYA AIRWAYS, LTD.; ORIX AVIATION ) No. 16 L 1950
SYSTEMS, LTD.; NISSEN KAIUN KABUSHIKI )
KAISHA; ORIX CORPORATION; and BOC ) The Honorable
AVIATION PTE., LTD. ) Kathy M. Flanagan,
) Judge Presiding.
Defendants, )
)
(Maureen Mary Yunkap Kwankam, Plaintiff-Appellant; )
Conrad F. Njamfa, Plaintiff-Appellee). )
JUSTICE PIERCE delivered the judgment of the court.
Presiding Justice Walker and Justice Coghlan concurred in the judgment.
ORDER
¶1 Held: The judgment of the circuit court is affirmed.
¶2 Plaintiff, Maureen Mary Yunkap Kwankam—acting pro se and in her individual
capacity—appeals from the circuit court’s entry of a final order distributing the proceeds of a
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settlement. The condition of the parties’ briefs on appeal, as well as the record on appeal, leave us
no choice but to affirm the circuit court’s judgment.
¶3 I. BACKGROUND
¶4 The following facts are supported by the record on appeal and our order in Kwankam v.
Kenya Airways, Ltd., 2020 IL App (1st) 191430-U (Kwankam I) dismissing a previous appeal in
this matter. As we set forth in Kwankam I,
“Patrick Nkamga Njamfa died in May 2007 when Kenya Airways Flight
507 crashed after takeoff from Douala International Airport in Cameroon. In April
2010, plaintiffs Maureen Mary Yunkap Kwankam and Conrad F. Njamfa, as co-
special administrators of Patrick’s estate, through counsel, filed a complaint
asserting wrongful death and survival claims against defendants Kenya Airways,
Ltd., Orix Aviation Systems, Ltd., Nissen Kaiun Kabushiki Kaisha, Orix Corp., and
BOC Aviation Pte., Ltd. None of the defendants were served with a summons or
complaint or filed any responsive pleadings. The parties, however, reached a
settlement agreement. On June 16, 2016, plaintiffs, through counsel, sought an
order approving the settlement agreement. The circuit court granted the motion the
same day, and ordered that the settlement proceeds be held in an interest bearing
bank account until the parties provided the circuit court “with the final status of all
proceedings in Cameroon as to the heirship of the [d]ecedent.” The record reflects
that there were ongoing proceedings in the Cameroonian courts to determine the
beneficiaries of Patrick’s estate, as there was a dispute over whether Patrick was
the father of Maureen’s children.
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The record on appeal does not reflect any further filings or orders in the
circuit court until May 28, 2019, when Conrad filed a pro se letter indicating that
the Supreme Court of Cameroon fully determined the heirs of Patrick’s estate. On
June 28, 2019, Maureen filed a pro se “Motion To [B]e [H]eard in Court Ex Parte:
[sic] For the Settlement and Distribution of Estate Property.” The record does not
contain a notice setting the motion for a hearing, and the circuit court did not enter
any order on the motion. On July 10, 2019, Maureen filed a pro se notice of appeal,
which listed the date of the judgment or order appealed from as June 16, 2018. The
record on appeal does not contain any judgment or order entered on that date, and
we assume that Maureen made a scrivener’s error when attempting to identify the
June 16, 2016, order approving the settlement.” Id. ¶¶ 4-5.
¶5 On January 21, 2020, we dismissed Maureen’s appeal, finding that we lacked appellate
jurisdiction because Maureen’s notice of appeal was untimely. Id. ¶¶ 7, 11.
¶6 The record does not reflect any activity between Maureen’s July 10, 2019, notice of appeal
in Kwankam I, and February 25, 2020, when the circuit court entered a final order distributing the
net proceeds of the settlement. The circuit court’s order made the following findings and
conclusions. The June 2016 settlement agreement provided that the net proceeds were to be
distributed to Patrick’s next of kin. Maureen and Conrad, however, disagreed about who were
Patrick’s next of kin. Maureen argued that she and her sons were Patrick’s next of kin and the
beneficiaries under the settlement because she was Patrick’s lawful spouse at the time of his death,
and that Patrick was the father of her two children, Patrick Nkamga Njamfa and Michael Nijmeni
Njamfa. Maureen’s children were born after Patrick’s death, purportedly through artificial
insemination. Conrad asserted, however, that Patrick and Maureen were divorced at the time of
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Patrick’s death, and that Maureen’s children were not Patrick’s lawful next of kin because they
were born more than 300 days after Patrick’s death. Conrad argued that Patrick’s children from a
previous marriage, Tiara-Marie Shilen Njamfa and Marcel Nkamga Njamfa, both minors, were
Patrick’s lawful heirs and next of kin. The dispute over who were Patrick’s next of kin was litigated
in the courts of Cameroon and that litigation concluded in July 2019 with a decision from the
Supreme Court of Cameroon. Conrad filed a letter with the clerk of the circuit court attaching the
Supreme Court of Cameroon’s final decision. On February 25, 2020, the circuit court entered a
written order distributing the proceeds of the previously approved settlement and found that Tiara-
Marie and Marcel had been adjudicated to be Patrick’s heirs and next of kin, that Maureen had
been adjudicated not to be Patrick’s spouse, and Maureen’s children were adjudicated not be
Patrick’s heirs and next of kin. The circuit court distributed the net settlement proceeds to Conrad,
as guardian of Tiara-Marie and Marcel.
¶7 Maureen filed a notice of appeal on March 13, 2020, from the circuit court’s distribution
order.
¶8 II. ANALYSIS
¶9 On appeal, Maureen raises two principal arguments. First, she argues that the circuit court
erred by determining that Maureen was not Patrick’s spouse at the time of his death. She contends
that she married Patrick in Cameroon in 1999 but was unaware that Patrick had an existing
marriage in the United States. She argues that her marriage to Patrick was nullified by the
Cameroonian courts in 2010 but that those courts “recognized [Maureen] as a common law spouse
who contracted the said marriage out of good faith ***.” Second, she argues that the circuit court
erred by distributing the entire settlement to Patrick’s heirs because under Cameroonian law she
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is entitled to 2/3 of the net settlement proceeds since she was Patrick’s common law spouse at the
time of his death with co-ownership of the marriage estate’s property.
¶ 10 At the outset, we observe that Maureen’s pro se appellate brief does not comply with our
supreme court’s rules. Maureen’s brief—which in part utilizes our supreme court’s approved form
for appellant’s briefs—does not contain a statement of jurisdiction, which is required by Illinois
Supreme Court Rule 341(h)(4) (eff. May 25, 2018). Furthermore, neither Maureen’s statement of
facts nor her argument section contains any citations to the record on appeal, and she sparingly
cites to the appendix of her brief to support factual assertions, in violation of Rules 341(h)(6) and
(7), respectively, which require that an appellant’s statement of facts and arguments contain
references to the pages of the record on appeal. Accordingly, Maureen has forfeited all her
arguments on appeal due to her noncompliance with Rule 341.
¶ 11 Next, Maureen’s table of contents for the 490-page appendix does not contain page
references to the record on appeal, and none of the appendix’s pages are numbered sequentially,
in violation of Rule 342 (eff. Oct. 1, 2019). And Maureen’s appendix contains nearly twice as
many pages as the entire 264-page record on appeal; many of the documents in her appendix are
not included in the record. Materials that are not taken from the record on appeal generally cannot
be placed before this court through an appellant’s appendix. Hubeny v. Chairse, 305 Ill. App. 3d
1038, 1042 (1999).
¶ 12 In addition to the deficiencies we have identified with Maureen’s brief, there are
insurmountable problems that preclude us from granting Maureen any relief. While the parties’
appellate briefs discuss Maureen’s legal rights in the wake of the Cameroonian courts’ decisions
in the nine years of litigation between the parties to this appeal, the record on appeal before us
contains no briefing on that issue—or any other issues—before the circuit court. Neither party
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filed any pleadings or adversarial briefs arguing their respective positions on any substantive issue
that was decided by the circuit court, and the record does not contain any transcripts of any hearings
that might have taken place before the circuit court. In other words, the parties did not develop a
record fleshing out any issues for our review. Furthermore, the arguments raised by the parties in
this court are raised for the first time in this court and are largely based on decisions from the
Cameroonian courts interpreting and applying Cameroonian law. But as this court has observed,
“Illinois courts cannot take judicial notice of the laws of foreign countries.” Bangaly v. Baggiani,
2014 IL App (1st) 123760, ¶ 145 (citing 735 ILCS 5/8-1007 (West 2010)). “[T]he laws of foreign
countries must be pled and proven as any other fact.” Id.¶ 13 Here, it appears from out review of the record before us that Maureen did not attempt to
introduce any aspect of Cameroonian law through any pleading, particularly what property rights
she might have under Cameroonian law after her marriage to Patrick was nullified. While she
directs our attention to several judgments entered by the Cameroonian courts purportedly resolving
that issue, none of those judgments are contained in the record on appeal. The only Cameroonian
judgment that appears in the record on appeal is the decision that Maureen’s children were not
Patrick’s heirs and next of kin. As such, we cannot say that Maureen established that she was
Patrick’s surviving spouse at the time of his death because she failed to plead or prove her status
as a surviving spouse under Illinois or Cameroonian law, and she failed to present any argument
or evidence tending to show that she was entitled to any portion of the wrongful death settlement.
¶ 14 As a court of review, we rely on a complete record developed in the lower court and
properly filed in this court. Without an acceptable record to support Maureen’s legal arguments,
we presume the judgment of the circuit court is correct and was based on the correct application
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of the law. Foutch v. O’Bryant, 99 Ill. 2d 389, 391-92 (1984). We therefore have no basis from
which to disturb the circuit court’s allocation and distribution of the settlement proceeds.
¶ 15 III. CONCLUSION
¶ 16 For the foregoing reasons, the judgment of the circuit court is affirmed.
¶ 17 Affirmed.
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