MILWAUKEE (WITI) — The Milwaukee County District Attorney’s Office has been using social media websites to track down deadbeat parents.
They are using the information they find about the moms and dads to hold them accountable.
For instance, three-year-old Casey is chock full of life; the kind of kid that makes you want to have kids. It’s hard to imagine what parent wouldn’t want to give him the world. But his own father barely gives him a dime.
“He’s paid a total of a $189 in three and a half years,” says Jennifer Cvikel, Casey’s mom, in aninterview with WITI.
She says he only paid that much just to keep himself out of jail.
If you do the math, John Rau has paid less than 14 cents a day since his son was born. It would be laughable if it weren’t so tragic. You see, Casey has leukemia.
“It’s a nightmare, I mean, your world just crashes right in front of you and you don’t even have a chance to react to it,” Cvikel remembers. “They just started taking him and this and that and more testing and then we were stuck in the hospital for weeks.”
For a year and a half, Casey suffered through chemotherapy, spinal taps and dozens of hospital stays. He even had to learn to walk again with physical therapy.
And through it all his father has not been by his side.
But all of his bragging on social media is exactly why he’s now facing felony charges for failing to pay child support.
And Rau isn’t the only one.
Melissa Jones got a nose job instead of paying her child support. Then there is Theoris Stewart the self-professed R&B sensation who bought a fancy music studio instead of paying child support.
Robert Ellis has 17 kids. Kelvin Jones has 13 kids. And Antonio Burks has 11 kids. They one thing they all have in common ? They haven’t always paid their child support.
“They don’t think they’re going to get caught,” says Maureen Atwell, an assistant district attorney at the Milwaukee County District Attorney’s Office says in an interview with WITI.
And that’s where they would be wrong. It’s not a crime if you can’t pay child support. It is a crime when you can afford to pay and you don’t pay on purpose for at least four months.
“I think the most important thing I do in my job is to weed out people who are simply too poor to pay their child support from people who can pay their child support and choosing not to,” Atwell says.
In other words, separating the deadbeats from the dead brokes.
“Social media has made a pretty big difference in our cases because it is a pretty good tool in determining who has resources and who doesn’t,” Atwell says.
McCroy doesn’t just have the money, he’s flaunting it. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Youtube — everywhere you look.
“Stacks and stacks of money, all this jewelry, the cars. It was just, like, wow, really?” says Haynes.
The guy seen flashing all that money on Facebook said he made it selling mix tapes. His rap name is Mr. JakItDown. He admitted he hasn’t paid child support in five years, but he insists there was a paperwork error,according to WITI.
“He not gonna sit here and lead a flashy life and not help me,” Haynes says.
Lucky for her, that flashy life may be the one thing that finally makes him pay up.
“I really think that it is not that they are too stupid to realize that this is evidence. I think they think nobody cares,” Atwell says.
Continue reading on WITI.
