THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, May 15, 1995 TAG: 9505150031
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY MATTHEW BOWERS, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: NORFOLK LENGTH: Long : 141 lines
Federico L. Ampey watches the money fly out, paycheck after paycheck, $153 every two weeks, child support for a 15-year-old Portsmouth girl. No one can call him a ``deadbeat dad.''
In fact, he says he's not a dad at all.
He's certainly not the father of the girl he's helped support the past three years. By analyzing DNA, a lab in Fairfax County confirmed that last month.
Ampey thought the genetics test would get him off the financial hook. As things stand now, his child-support payments take a quarter of his take-home pay. He says he's had to give up his car and take a bus to work, and sell his home.
But canceling his child-support obligation is turning out to be difficult.
Virginia law makes it tough to get paternity changed. Real tough. It follows a doctrine that judges generally don't reconsider what's already been decided in court, new evidence or no.
A judge last month noted in court records that the DNA test shows Ampey is not the girl's father. Still, he said, Ampey needed to return in June with a lawyer to argue for an end to his child-support obligation. The state and the girl's guardians are expected to object. Ampey says he can't afford what lawyers say they'd charge him.
``Why am I being forced to pay child support for a child who isn't mine?'' Ampey asks over and over again. ``It really isn't right. It's unfair.''
It's a mess for Ampey. For the girl, it's likely worse.
She apparently has never known her real father; she had been told he was Ampey. Her mother is in a coma, the result of complications during a subsequent childbirth almost six years ago. Since then, the girl has been shuttled from Norfolk to Germany to Portsmouth among four sets of relatives and the mother's boyfriend.
When she heard the DNA evidence in court last month, the finality seemed to be too much for her. She broke down and cried outside the courtroom.
Ampey feels bad about that. He's always liked the girl. He says she sort of grew on him as her mother kept bringing her around, even as he was disavowing that he was her father. He bought her occasional presents when she was young, including a bicycle with training wheels the Christmas she was 6.
``She had been so programmed that I was her dad, that made a difference, too,'' he says.
His parents accepted her as their granddaughter over his complaints that he wasn't her father. Her name even was listed as a survivor in his parents' obituaries, which angered him. When the Division of Child Support Enforcement started taking money out of his paycheck for the girl, he felt he had to act.
Ampey, a 37-year-old Norfolk native, was a young Marine when he met Andrea D. Parham at a Christmas party. She was the younger sister of friends. They saw each other several times in the next few months, and eventually became intimate. Ampey says he broke it off when he found out she was younger than he thought. Then he was shipped to Greenland for six months.
When he returned, she was pregnant and calling him the father. But she was just four months pregnant, Ampey notes.
Parham's daughter was born in July 1979, and both the mother and the girl became frequent visitors to the home of Ampey's parents. No mention was made of financial support.
That came after Parham became comatose. At first, beginning in January 1990, the woman's boyfriend - the father of her other three children - had custody of the girl. Anthony Barnhill had helped raise her for nine years, and she called him ``Daddy.'' He even was listed as her father on a court record of his custody hearing, although Barnhill now says that was a mistake.
But in March 1991, the girl's grandfather received custody. Ampey went to court for the hearing that day. He says he thought he was going to be a witness for the grandfather. But the judge surprised him by asking him if he was the father.
A ``shell-shocked'' Ampey stammered and said, ``No - I don't know.'' Then, he says, he felt intimidated into signing some papers before he had a chance to read them completely. He now believes the papers were an admission of paternity. The judge granted ``reasonable visitation'' to Ampey and the boyfriend, but he didn't mention child support.
But in December 1991, the girl's grandmother - Andrea Parham's mother - got custody and sought child support. A month later the money started coming out of Ampey's paycheck from a food-vending company.
He petitioned the court to have the obligation overturned, writing, ``I believe myself (supposedly the father) and the child have a right to the truth.'' But in April 1992 his request was rejected. A judge noted: ``Paternity established already.''
In February 1993, the girl's aunt and uncle got custody. In April, Ampey's state tax refund was seized for back child-support payments that apparently didn't make it from his employer, which has since gone out of business, to Richmond headquarters of the Division of Child Support Enforcement. Ampey says all this led him, that September, to tell a North Carolina notary public that he was the father of Parham's daughter and to sign his consent for her to be adopted by the aunt and uncle.
``Hey, I was paying like I was her father,'' Ampey says.
The adoption never took place. Six months later, in March 1994, another aunt took custody. In July, Ampey started working for the Norfolk Sheriff's Department as a maintenance worker with plans to be trained as a deputy. Child-support payments again started coming out of his paycheck, higher now to cover back money the state said he owed.
In November, he asked the court to allow him to take a DNA test. He did so in March, paying for it with $256 out of his own pocket. He and Parham's daughter heard the results last month, the results that left him still frustrated and the girl in tears.
``She had been told all this time, `He's your dad. He's your dad. He's your dad,' '' Ampey says.
He shakes his head. ``I don't have a child. This is not my child.''
The girl and her aunt-guardian, Rosita L. Parham, declined to talk about Ampey's case.
Wesley A. Murphy, a lawyer appointed by a judge in December to represent the girl, agrees with Ampey that it's difficult to overturn a paternity finding. But he wonders aloud why Ampey didn't object more strenuously or seek genetic or blood testing in 1992, when the child-support payments started.
Virginia law requires ``clear and convincing'' evidence of paternity. A written statement under oath, an admission in court, or a judge's ordering of child support all constitute such evidence; so does a genetic test.
In Ampey's case, those things conflict.
Past Virginia rulings have barred other men from challenging paternity after it had been decided. One man's case even involved a blood test that proved he wasn't the father in question. One judge in that case argued that the ``ends of justice'' required that the case be reopened, but his was a dissent from the majority ruling.
Barnhill, Parham's boyfriend, has been raising two of his young children alone in Norfolk since Parham slipped into her coma. (The youngest child is with grandparents.) Barnhill says he'd gladly have kept the girl Ampey's been helping to support, but a judge told him the law required she go with blood relatives. He keeps in touch with her, and thinks Ampey should've pitched in too, father or not.
``If his parents accepted (her) as their granddaughter - what's the big deal?'' Barnhill asks. ``Here was a child who needs some help.
``Everybody thought he was the father. . . . The girl needs somebody to say, `This is my daddy.' ''
Ampey sympathizes, but only to a point.
``Who's going to pay me my taxes back? The child is not mine,'' he says. ``It makes me think, How many other . . . supposed dads are being railroaded?'' ILLUSTRATION: [Color Photo]
BETH BERGMAN
Staff
A DNA test proved that Federico L. Ampey is not the father of a
teenage girl, but he's still required to pay child support.
KEYWORDS: CHILD SUPPORT PATERNITY by CNB