Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: THURSDAY, August 3, 1995                   TAG: 9508030029
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: C-5   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: NORFOLK                                 LENGTH: Medium

HE MAY NOT BE DAD, BUT HE STILL HAS TO PAY CHILD SUPPORT

Federico L. Ampey knows he is not the father of a 16-year-old girl. She knows it, too, and so do the lawyers and judge who argued and heard the child support case against him.

Still, Ampey must continue to pay more than $300 in monthly child support for a daughter that even recent DNA tests show isn't his.

Relying on a centuries-old legal doctrine of not retrying issues or facts already decided, the judge on Tuesday ordered the payments to continue.

``Orders have to have some sense of finality,'' Judge William P. Williams said in Juvenile and Domestic Relations District Court. ``They govern lives, and people have to know that they can rely on them.''

Williams ruled the paternity finding against Ampey was made properly in January 1992 and that Ampey had ample opportunity to contest it. The judge also noted that Ampey had identified himself as the father on documents.

``If Mr. Ampey's claim to be the father of this child has done some damage to him, I'm sorry. My heart goes out to him,'' the judge said, adding that ``200 years of jurisprudence'' takes precedence.

``I don't feel like there's any real justice going on here,'' Ampey, a Norfolk sheriff's deputy, said after the hearing.

The girl, now 16, was not in court Tuesday. She is in the custody of Norfolk's Division of Social Services after years of being shuffled among relatives.

Rosita L. Parham, an aunt and former guardian of the girl, doesn't hold Ampey's battle against him.

``I would hope he gets his stuff straight,'' she said. ``It's not right to have to take care of a girl who's not yours.''

Lawyers for the Virginia Division of Child Support Enforcement, the girl and her mother all argued for keeping the twice monthly $153 support payments, based on the legal precedents.

``He got a raw deal - that's what it boils down to,'' said Everett C. Meixel, a Virginia Beach lawyer who donated his services to Ampey after reading about his child-support battle.

Ampey said he has tried to overturn the paternity ruling and child-support order from the beginning. In November he asked the court to order the genetics test, paying the $256 fee himself.

A brief affair with the young mother ended a year or more before the girl was born, and he denied being her father from the start even as his own parents treated her as a grandchild.

The mother slipped into a coma-like state almost six years ago during childbirth. Only then did the mother's family start seeking child support from Ampey.

In 1993, he purposely called himself the girl's father on adoption papers he signed for the girl's aunt and uncle, hoping to end his child-support obligation that way. But the adoption never went through.

Ampey said he has been hampered by not having the money to hire a lawyer. He also said he was intimidated by judges and court personnel into signing things he didn't read.