04191999 - News Article - Mom ends battle for support

Mom ends battle for support
Tamara Schwanke quits system after it starts new round with delinquent father who is on parole for non - payment
NWI Times
Apr 19, 1999
http://www.nwitimes.com/uncategorized/mom-ends-battle-for-support/article_c5457729-2c39-5631-b1b2-d6d015ba1097.html
HEBRON -- More than three years ago, Karen Wheeler of Chesterton was so vexed from trying to collect $34,000 in child support that she and her children picketed on the steps to the Porter County Administration Center.

Tamara Schwanke of Hebron is taking a different route.

She's decided to quit trying.

"I give up. I'm done."

Schwanke, 33, said she finds the collection system as "degrading" as trying to make her former husband meet his responsibilities.

Court records show Schwanke's former husband, David Fedornock, 35, was more than $16,000 behind in child support payments in 1995. Schwanke claims the actual amount is much more than twice that figure.

Superior Court Judge Thomas Webber ultimately sentenced Fedornock to three years in the Indiana Department of Corrections for failing to support the couple's daughter. He served 18 months.

It took eight years for authorities to throw in the towel on Fedornock and seek the criminal charges that sent him to prison. A probable cause affidavit said "any further efforts to force compliance from the defendant through the civil courts would be pointless."

Since Fedornock's release from prison in mid-September, court records show he's paid $1,930 to the Porter County Clerk's Office.

But $1,400 of that amount was paid in a lump sum on March 17, the same day he was ordered into court for a hearing after Schwanke notified prosecutors Fedornock was again delinquent in making the payments.

It's uncertain who made the payment or how. Fedornock never showed up for the hearing, prompting a bench warrant for his arrest. There's no record of any payment since that time.

And Schwanke actually received only $350 of the $1,400 because the state of Indiana kept the rest.

"The state wants its take first," Schwanke said.

She said she hasn't been on public assistance in four years, but the state is trying to get its money back for when she was.

Schwanke said the state, however, told her it would send the whole amount if Bruce Dumas, head of the Child Support Collection Division in Porter County, would OK it.

But Schwanke said Dumas' office told her he doesn't take calls. "You always have to write a letter and you can't expect to talk to anyone and you have to expect a six-week wait before any response," she said.

"The prosecutors say I have a hearing July 14, but that's three months, for god's sake."

Dumas couldn't be reached.

His boss, Porter County Prosecutor James Douglas, said the only thing he knew for certain about the case was that his office didn't agree with the most recent decision by Magistrate James Johnson, who also couldn't be reached.

Johnson released Fedornock, who is on parole, without bond after his arrest last week for failing to appear at the March hearing.

Douglas said the case, as described to him, was "the kind of case that drives everybody nuts."

"Most people, although you have to chase them forever, generally start paying before they have to go to jail," he said. "Now you're talking about going through the whole system and he's back not paying and what are we going to do with him?"

Steve Meyer, the county's chief adult probation officer, said he has a similar case.

"We kept locking him up," Meyer said. "Then he fell out of a tree and we went after his disability pay."

"We kept going back and forth, and the guy's still $15,000 in arrearage."

Meyer said putting delinquent parents in jail doesn't mean they don't still have to pay child support. What to do? "Do we keep them on probation forever?"

Fedornock couldn't be reached, but his mother, Corliss Fedornock, said the case is complicated and she never has figured out how the system determines what's current and what's past support.

Without Dumas available, no one at the county level could explain it either.

Trips to the offices of Dumas, Douglas, the probation department and the child support payment office came up short.

But whatever the amount, Corliss Fedornock thinks the case should have been handled differently from the start.

"I'm not saying he shouldn't pay," she said. "He should."

Fedornock, like her former daughter-in-law, faults the system.

"The lawyers don't look into it," she said. "The court-appointed person comes into it once or twice. Do they really look into it? I doubt it."

Children's advocates known as court-appointed special advocates or guardians ad litem are often appointed to such cases.

For her part, Schwanke, a purchasing agent for a wire manufacturer, said she's had enough.

"I've had to call my daughter in from the front porch where she's waited for him until after dark."

When Fedornock went to prison, she thought she was through feeling she was being laughed at by the system.

"I thought somebody listened to me and gave me some justice," she said.

But she said she feels she's back at the bottom again.

"I'm not a money-hungry person," she said. "My daughter's 13. To me the money means if she wants to go to a dance, we can buy her a nice dress."

With her daughter beginning to lose interest in her father, Schwanke said she thinks further struggles to collect child support are useless.

"They know they can get away with it. They know they can beat the system."