Attorney General releases state’s top child support evaders
I consider the failure to pay child support a form of child abuse. Parents who don’t take care of their children financially or emotionally are depriving them of the essential needs in their lives, such as school supplies, such as clothes, such as medical care, but, more importantly, the emotional support they need to grow up in this world. Parents across Texas need to know they have a legal obligation to pay the child support that they are required to pay. If they don’t pay that child support, we will hold them accountable. We will track them down, we will arrest them and we will put them behind bars.
- Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott
I’ve never been much on public humiliation. Keeping someone in stocks in the public square or forcing them to wear a scarlet letter is so 19th-century. Of course, every rule has it’s exception, and mine is for parents who neglect or refuse to meet their court-ordered child support payment. It’s something I feel strongly about, having married a single parent and experiencing the travails of the issues surrounding an absentee parent and their financial responsibilties.
Thankfully, Susan’s ex- met his obligation willingly. Of course, he makes a gazillion dollars and got a sweeheart deal on the child support order. His contiribution to Adam and Eric’s upbringing was nowhere near 25% of his income, but he did what he was required to do, and I certainly can’t fault him- especially when he is viewed in the reflected light of this rogue’s gallery.
What sort of man runs out on his children, often forcing them to live in poverty, supported by a single mother who more often than has all she can do to make ends meet? In doing so, she ends up neglecting her children and missing a good portion of their childhood because…well, because there’s only so much of her to go around.
Yes, if you’re man enough to participate in making a baby, you’re man enough to support that child. To their credit most men willingly meet and some even exceed their responsibility. That some don’t means that the state of Texas needs to get involved, and sometimes public ridicule is the best (perhaps even only) weapon available.
AUSTIN - When her ex-husband neglected to pay his $400-a-month child support allotment, Dyanne Meyers was forced to take a second job, just to make ends meet.
She still regrets that today.
“I missed out on the early years of my daughter’s life, which I will never regain,” said Meyers, who lives in Burnet.
But what is more heartbreaking, she said, is that her 16-year-old daughter missed out on having a father and that her ex-husband, Harry Bomnskie, missed out on knowing a “beautiful, smart” girl.
Bomnskie, an auto mechanic, joins nine others on Attorney’s General Greg Abbott’s Top 10 Most Wanted Child Support Evaders, wanted for owing collectively more than half a million dollars. Bomnskie owes his family more than $35,000 and is supposedly staying in Houston.
A San Antonio man, John Lowry, 46, also made the list. An upholstery and windshield repairman, he owes $30,899 in child support for three children.
Abbott released this year’s list Monday, in hopes that the public could provide his office with information about the men on it. Those who make the list, he said, are the “worst offenders” and have “gone underground or into hiding to completely avoid their responsibility” of caring for their child.
You know, I’m not sure that there’s a lower lifeform than someone who would abandon his own children. In a perfect world, families would stay together, and children would grow up with a mother and father under the same roof. Sadly, that doesn’t always happen, and while most divorced fathers willingly meet their responsibility, their are those selfish sorts more concerned about their own well-being than that of their children. Tell me this isn’t an argument for forced sterilization….
Perhaps it is time that we set up a few of these miscreants in stocks in the village square.
