Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, March 20, 1992 TAG: 9203200325
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ED SHAMY
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
It's the routine of a frustrated woman. She has raised her son alone and has found that the child-support bureaucracy lacks the resources to aggressively pursue every debt-dodging dad.
When this fellow vanished out of state, no one but Edna seemed much concerned about finding him. She paid the bills, without help, for nine years. She never told her son that daddy was a heel. What for?
Edna thought it might be instructive if Rep. Jim Olin heard regularly about the daily financial difficulties that challenge the single parent. She wrote letters.
And she tried to be realistic. She'd probably never get a dime's worth of help.
But in October, Edna read an obituary. Richard Greene, the man who'd ducked his obligation for nearly a decade, would be in town for a funeral. His father had died.
Edna moved quickly. The obituary appeared on a Wednesday. The funeral was Thursday.
Edna called the state's support enforcement agency. She told them that Greene would be in town for the funeral, that he'd skirted nine years' worth of child support payments and that she'd appreciate their efforts in apprehending him while he was in Roanoke.
The agency balked.
Edna decided to cash in her chips with Jim Olin's office. Remember the little boy you've watched grow up? she asked. His daddy will be in town, he owed a lot of money to help support his son, and I can't find any help.
The biannual letters paid off.
There ensued a great grinding of the judicial and bureaucratic gears.
Richard Greene was apprehended a couple of hours after his father's funeral. He had been living in Massachusetts.
"Since Oct. 24, we've been to court five times," says Edna. She works as a nurse at the Veterans Administration Medical Center in Salem.
Men and women churned into the justice system by their marital woes, or their shared children, or both, quickly learn the process. Edna is no exception. She describes in detail how she and Richard Greene jousted in court, and how the tangled mess - aimed merely at helping a kid grow up with just a minimum of financial security - landed eventually in Circuit Court.
Greene was not treated kindly. On March 10, he was ordered to pay $30 a week to Edna to help support their son. Of that, half is paying the support he missed for nine years. It will take 15 years to catch up.
Greene now is in the Roanoke County Jail on charges related to failing to pay his court-ordered child support.
Before he went to jail, Greene did something he hadn't done since his son was born.
He wrote a check.
Wednesday, Edna Osborne got a $30 check. She still hadn't cashed it Thursday afternoon. She was kind of savoring it.
She plans to buy 30 lottery tickets. After nine years, she wants to do something frivolous, a luxury never afforded her. She'll mail the losers, she says, to Richard Greene.
by CNB