ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, August 26, 1996 TAG: 9608260077
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 VIRGINIA EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: LESLIE TAYLOR STAFF WRITER
The envelope arrived in Brian and Susan Nichols' mailbox last December, two weeks before Christmas.
Susan Nichols opened it. What she found "turned our lives upside down," she said.
Inside was a summons from the Virginia Division of Child Support Enforcement's district office in Roanoke. A woman had identified a "Brian Nichols" as the father of her 4-year-old daughter.
This Brian Nichols - husband of Susan, father of the couple's 8-year-old daughter and 4-year-old son - was being ordered to appear at the division's district office off Franklin Road. He was believed to be the Brian Nichols they were looking for.
"It shook me up so bad," said Brian Nichols, a nursing home worker who lives in a Southeast Roanoke public housing development. "I'd never been arrested, never had anything except a couple of speeding tickets. And I've known everybody I've ever had sexual relations with and I don't know this woman."
But he complied with the summons. Panicked, he also hired a lawyer, taking out a $500 loan to cover the fee.
At a meeting with child support workers he discovered that the Brian Nichols the woman had identified as her child's father was 35, born in November, had blond hair and brown eyes and was "5-foot something."
This Brian Nichols is 6-foot-4 and has blue eyes and dark brown hair. He will turn 30 in September.
"The only information they had right was the name and the race - white," Brian Nichols said. "I can't blame the lady. I can't blame Social Services for trying to get a father to pay. But it seems to me they could at least have gotten some facts straight."
Wayne Chapman, manager of the Roanoke district child support enforcement office, said cases such as this are rare, considering the number the office handles - currently about 26,000. In about 2,500 of those cases, paternity has not been established, he said.
The summons Brian Nichols received was an administrative summons - "a form that basically asks someone to come in and talk to us," Chapman said.
"There are processes and procedures that we follow," he said. "But we certainly don't take [legal] steps against anyone until we're sure they are the right individual. We want to safeguard the rights of any individual."
The Nicholses had been having marital troubles - jobs, money and caring for two children, Susan Nichols said.
The possibility of Brian Nichols fathering a child outside the marriage - however unlikely - "kicked things over the edge," Brian Nichols said. The couple separated.
They are back together now, eight months after receiving the summons. But it had lingered over their heads. The Division of Child Support Enforcement couldn't completely dismiss Brian Nichols as a paternal possibility, because the woman refused to cooperate further with the investigation.
But recently, Brian Nichols received another letter from the child support enforcement district office in Roanoke.
"I am writing to inform you [that the mother] has confirmed that you are not the correct Brian Nichols," an administrator wrote. "I have removed your information from this case and will need no further contact with you. I would like to apologize for the inconvenience this has caused you and your wife."
Brian Nichols said his first reaction was relief. "Then it sort of made me mad," he said. "I spent money on a lawyer, and I really didn't need him. I didn't need all of this. But I didn't know any better.
"I told my mom that that piece of paper meant more to me than my diploma. I can show it to my wife, and when I look at her, I don't see doubt in her eyes. Now I feel I'm not the only one who knows the truth."
Cases such as Brian Nichols' shouldn't happen at all - although occasionally, unfortunately, they do, said Michael Henry, former director of the Virginia Division of Child Support Enforcement. Henry left the director's post in January to work for the Virginia office of Policy Studies Inc., a Denver-based consulting firm that works in child support and other welfare-related areas.
The Division of Child Support Enforcement "does everything in its power to ensure that doesn't happen," he said. "It's an unfortunate event that can cause the person who's been subpoenaed great personal problems."
Henry headed the child support enforcement office for the state of Missouri before heading Virginia's. He recalled several instances of mistaken paternity in Missouri.
In one case, a woman named seven men as paternal possibilities. All seven were brought in for blood testing. None matched.
"We finally determined the mother was just picking names out of the newspaper," Henry said. "I've seen cases of wrong generation, senior instead of junior. Those kinds of mistakes happen. In processing thousands of thousands of cases, mistakes will be made."
Virginia has committed itself to tracking down parents - primarily fathers - who owe child support. More than $850 million in support payments is owed in Virginia.
State child-support laws have become tougher in the past two years. Courts can suspend the state-issued business, professional and driver's licenses of parents who have been ordered to pay child support and fail to do so.
In fiscal year 1995-96, the laws enabled the state to bring in $21 million in previously uncollectible child support, according to the Department of Social Services.
August has been declared Child Support Month in Virginia. Later this month, the state will release its 10th "10 Most Wanted" list of child support evaders. They are not necessarily those individuals who owe the most but those identified as the hardest cases to enforce. The program was started in 1989 to highlight the problem of unpaid child support.
Tougher child-support collection was woven into the state's year-old welfare-to-work plan in the belief that if fathers who owed support were paying up, mothers wouldn't need welfare. The majority of welfare recipients in Virginia are women.
Gov. George Allen has called child-support enforcement crucial to the welfare plan, which cuts off Aid to Families with Dependent Children - the nation's primary form of welfare - after two years.
The old system did not provide adequate incentives for welfare recipients to identify the fathers of their children, Henry said. But the two-year limit seems to have proven enough of one, he said.
"The time limit and other aspects of the welfare plan are having more of an impact on the attitude of recipients," Henry said. "Many of them are beginning to understand that they may need to bring fathers into the formal system, get paternity established in the likelihood of getting regular child support after the two-year time limit."
The attitude change may also be linked to the new welfare policy requiring recipients and applicants to cooperate in establishing paternity.
The old policy required AFDC recipients and applicants to cooperate by providing all available information on the father's identity, but benefits were not denied if a recipient could not do so.
Under the new policy, recipients and applicants are required to provide a host of identifying information, and failure to provide it is interpreted as noncooperation, resulting in denial, reduction or termination of benefits. The new policy prompted a lawsuit by two women whose AFDC benefits were reduced or cut off because they couldn't identify the fathers of their children.
The state has defended the policy as imperative to the welfare-to-work program. Clarence Carter, commissioner of the Virginia Department of Social Services, said earlier that the new policy makes no allowances for women who do not know the fathers of their children.
Henry said it would be interesting to study whether more misidentified people are being pulled in for questioning by child support offices as a result of the new policy.
Mark Callahan of Patrick County was misidentified last month as the father of a welfare recipient's son. The woman's AFDC benefits had been cut because she couldn't provide the state-required information on the father's identity.
The woman - one of the two women who sued the state over the paternity identification policy - had said the father could have been a man she'd had a one-night stand with in 1988. She remembered him only as "Mark." Child support workers' pursuit of "Mark" led them to Callahan.
Callahan was given three choices: admit the child was his, voluntarily submit to a blood test, or be court-ordered to do so. Callahan was deemed an unlikely possibility before he ever had a chance to choose.
"The agency finds itself in a difficult position," Henry said. "It's their job to find out who the fathers of children born out of wedlock are and establish paternity."
Virginians should consider themselves fortunate, Henry said. The pursuit of parents who owe child support could be worse.
"The nice thing about the Virginia procedure is you don't start with a lawsuit," Henry said. "That's probably the norm in most states. It's much more unnerving than getting an administrative summons."
Tell that to Brian Nichols. A summons was plenty unnerving, he said.
"I had to defend myself for doing absolutely nothing," he said. "To realize a perfect stranger could have that much control over your life - that really shook me up."
LENGTH: Long : 162 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: STEPHANIE KLEIN-DAVIS/Staff. Brian Nichols of Southeastby CNBRoanoke separated from his wife, Susan, after he received a summons
in which a woman he didn't know
claimed he was the father of her daughter. color.