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Friends of the Fourth
District:
I want to share with you this month the success Los Angeles County
is having with the recent launch of a 10 Most Wanted List to track
down and capture the County’s ten most egregious child support
payment evaders. This list features some of the County’s worst child
support offenders. The ten individuals together owe more than $2
million in unpaid child support for 17 children. The individual
amounts owed range from $63,000 to over $427,000 per person.
Together these ten evaders owe $2,032,296.90 to their children;
these families are struggling to pay their bills because this
specific group of parents is choosing to evade or ignore their
responsibilities. With this new 10 Most Wanted List, the County now
has another tool in aggressively tracking down these uncooperative
parents. In fact, since the launch of the List at a press conference
on March 18, two members of the Most Wanted List have already been
caught.
Abdoul R. Sesay was arrested at an apartment in Marina del Rey
exactly one week after the launch of the List. Sesay owes the
largest amount of unpaid support of any member of the Most Wanted
List, more than $427,000. He has been wanted for nearly three years,
with the original warrant for his arrest being issued on May 2,
2005.
Michael Lee, a second member of the 10 Most Wanted List, surrendered
to authorities the day after our press conference, after seeing his
image broadcast by the media at the launch of the Most Wanted List.
Lee owes over $60,000 in unpaid child support and a warrant for his
arrest had been outstanding since January 1999.
Both men have just a few weeks to make substantial down payments on
their back child support and to begin coming current on their late
payments, otherwise judges in both cases have promised to put both
men behind bars.
Prior to the launch of our 10 Most Wanted List, the County
previously had a list of the most wanted delinquent parents, but in
the past, the Child Support Services Department (CSSD) had no way of
arresting and bringing these offenders to court. That changed last
April when I helped create a partnership between CSSD and the Office
of the District Attorney to establish the Child Support Arrest
Warrant Project. The project is designed to pursue uncooperative
parents who evade their child support obligations even after arrest
and bench warrants have been issued against them for failing to
appear in criminal court. I secured $500,000 to assist in funding
District Attorney Investigators who will seek out, investigate and
arrest these child support evaders.
CSSD has a number of options to pursue the collection of child
support payments on behalf of families in need, and always seeks to
establish cooperative relationships with the parents required to
make payments. Unfortunately, there are hundreds of parents
currently in the County’s system that go to great lengths to evade
their child support obligations, even after arrest warrants have
been issued. There are approximately 1,240 parents with outstanding
warrants who fall into this category, and they owe several million
dollars in child support payments. Since the use of District
Attorney Investigators began on December 4, 2007, 160 of those 1,240
warrants have been cleared.
By going after the members of our Most Wanted List, Los Angeles
County is sending a strong message that this kind of behavior is
unacceptable and has serious legal consequences. The message here is
clear: if you constantly evade your child support payments, we are
coming after you with every legal recourse we have available in
order to get that money in the hands of the children and families
who need it.
DON KNABE
Supervisor, Fourth District
County of Los Angeles
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