BACK TO JAIL?

Deadbeat dad faces criminal charges
Maine man said to owe $48K in child support

A deadbeat dad who owes nearly $48,000 in back child support to his family in Halifax faces criminal charges of abandoning his five children.

Timothy Daniels, 47, of Milbridge, Maine, pleaded innocent Monday to abandonment and failure to pay charges. He was among the deadbeat parents featured last summer in a Patriot Ledger series about parents who refuse to pay child support and a state system that fails to enforce payment.

Most deadbeat parent cases are handled in civil court. It is rare for prosecutors to charge deadbeats criminally. The state Department of Revenue each year pursues criminal charges against only 50 of the 5,100 cases it brings to court.

Daniels faces charges of abandoning a child without support, leaving Massachusetts without paying child support and failure to comply with a child support order. He was held on $15,000 bail and is due back in court Jan. 18.

Virginia Daniels of Halifax spent nearly 15 years trying to get her ex-husband to make regular child support payments after the couple divorced in 1990. The state has been unable to get many payments for her.

In November, Virginia Daniels contacted the Plymouth County District Attorney’s Office and asked prosecutors to file criminal charges against her ex-husband.

“I had just kind of had it,” Daniels, 43, said. “Now he can’t just go back to Maine and forget he’s got five children.”

This is the first time Timothy Daniels has been criminally charged with failing to pay child support, but it isn’t the first time he has served time in jail for not paying.

After an attorney at the law office where Virginia Daniels works as a paralegal took on her case for free, they got a civil arrest warrant against her ex-husband. It was unenforceable, however, because Timothy Daniels was living in Maine.

Then Virginia Daniels saw from an obituary that her ex-husband’s mother had died, so she knew he would return to Massachusetts for the funeral – and she knew it was her chance to grab him. Constable Jerry Loomis arrested Timothy Daniels moments after he left his mother’s funeral Mass in Quincy in October 2003. That arrest led a judge to order him to pay $10,000 in back child support or serve six months in jail. After serving five months, he and his family agreed to give his portion of his mother’s estate to his ex-wife.

Since he got out of jail, Virginia Daniels said her ex-husband paid $100 for three weeks, then stopped paying. She has not yet seen a portion of his mother’s estate, she said.

Daniels is off welfare, but she is still struggling. She works two jobs, but her children still have no health insurance because she can’t afford the premiums – and one of her sons has severe asthma. Her lights and heat have been turned off more times than she can count. She owes $8,000 to the electric company and $3,000 in medical bills.