D.A. Bills the Dead for Child Support

Marion Duff lost her only son five months ago. And ever since James Duff died, his mother has suffered through the maddening ritual of receiving his monthly child support bills from the office of Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti.

“You know how upsetting it is to get these notices?” she asked recently, anxiously rubbing her forehead as she sat before a pile of papers on her kitchen table.

Duff said that in May she sent back the first bill with a copy of her son’s death certificate. She got another bill. She called the district attorney’s office but couldn’t reach a live person and left a message. She got another bill. And another. And another.

“I just want the letters to stop,” she said, breaking into tears. “I mean, for God’s sake, he’s been dead for five months.”

Late last week, Duff said she was finally contacted by the district attorney’s office. Officials asked if she could send them another copy of the death certificate.

There may be no greater illustration of what critics say are the weaknesses in the district attorney’s child support unit than its practice of billing dead men--sometimes for years.

Lumbering along with a complex computer system that baffles some workers, and so deluged with mail that some employees report throwing letters away, Garcetti’s office fails to collect money in the vast majority of its 500,000-plus cases and is ranked the poorest-performing in the state. Some critics contend that it tries to make up for that failure by squeezing every dime it can from those few debtor parents it finds--a strategy they say helps no one.

Every deceased parent it bills allows the office to incrementally boost its performance statistics, a goal that critics say overshadows its true mission of actually collecting child support.

“They have live fathers out there they are not trying to get support from,” said Betty Tillman, “but they are trying to get support from ones who are deceased.”

For at least the last six years, the district attorney’s office has been sending bills for a long-dead relative to Tillman’s home, family members say. Making things more curious, the man sought by the district attorney never lived there.

The man, Roy Davis, whose child support case dates back to the 1970s, last lived in Oklahoma, according to public records. But the bills, which now have a past due balance of $15,391, have not stopped coming to Tillman’s home in Compton.

“You tell them he’s dead . . . and they are still sending letters,” said Tillman’s daughter, Suzanne Thomas. “All they have to do is punch up his Social Security number. How hard is that?”

A Times research librarian spent less than 15 minutes to verify not only Davis’ death but Duff’s as well.

Victoria Pipkin, a spokeswoman for the district attorney, said, “It’s not like we’re picking through graveyards.” Pipkin said that even after a person has died, the office is required to continue to search for assets that can be collected.

In the case of Duff, Pipkin said the case had to be kept open until the district attorney’s office could confirm his death. The office confirmed it Thursday, she said.

But others inside and outside Garcetti’s office say the billings reflect an agency running on automatic pilot.

“We can only read black and white. . . . No one thinks on their own,” said one longtime employee, who added that reports of the office pursuing dead men have been routine in her many years on the job.

The billings, she contends, prove that the agency is ignoring one of its basic tasks--opening the mail. Several other workers confirmed that bundles of unopened mail are sometimes just thrown away.

“There’s no way to even estimate how many letters are in there telling us people are deceased, because we are not working the mail,” said the employee.

That confirms a long-held suspicion of attorney Jane Preece of the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles.

“I think that is just an example that they don’t open their mail and respond to it. It is just typical of how they don’t deal with any issue,” said Preece, who sits on a county commission that oversees the family support office. “Then they create so much more mail by all their dumb activities.”

Officials in the district attorney’s office have denied that any mail is thrown away.

Another longtime family support employee suggested that billing the dead underscores another difficulty for the agency.

“The problem . . . is in the pecking order of priorities,” said the employee. “If you have someone calling to complain about a case, you work that. . . . So some of the things that should be routine get pushed aside.”

The result, she said, is that even correcting records to stop billing the dead can take what seems like an eternity. “It can take a long time . . . and if a relative, like the mother, is getting the correspondence . . . that can be pretty emotional.”

Even in cases in which Garcetti’s office knows the debtor parent is dead, it may continue to pursue the deceased.

Pedro Gomez died in April with a child support debt of more than $11,000 to repay the welfare system for his three children, court records show.

The 73-year-old Highland Park man had been out of work for 18 years after an industrial accident and lived off government aid until he died of complications from diabetes, his family said.

Yet prosecutors continued to press the case in court, establishing paternity a month after Gomez’s death and asking a court commissioner to allow the case to proceed on the possibility that Gomez had left money they could seize.

“Where are they going to find the money?” asked Gomez’s incredulous ex-wife, Carmen Gomez.

Defense attorney Ramon Mora found himself in the odd position of representing the dead man in court. And like Gomez’s family, he cannot help but question the priorities of the district attorney’s office.

“They’re making a mountain out of a molehill,” Mora said. “They should spend their resources on people who are living.”

Pipkin, of the district attorney’s office, said Gomez died after admitting paternity, so authorities went ahead with a scheduled court date. They searched for assets but found none, she said.

All Marion Duff wants is an end to the billing of her son.

A onetime merchant seaman and sometime longshoreman, James Duff died at age 41 of a drug overdose--devastated, his mother said, by the breakup of his marriage, which produced one son.

The boy, now 5, lives with his mother in Seattle and, according to Marion Duff, has received the only real asset his father had, a pension fund worth about $20,000.

Meantime, the district attorney’s office has continued to send bills to Marion Duff. The most recent statement showed a balance of $28,256, and counting.

“Doesn’t anybody open their mail? Has his death certificate been just sitting on somebody’s desk?”

The billing of dead men has spawned at least one dark joke inside the child support agency.

Workers recall a letter that one exasperated mother recently wrote Garcetti’s office to give them a forwarding number for her own late son.

“If you really want to reach him,” she reportedly wrote, “dial 1-800-HEAVEN.”

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Times researcher Janet Lundblad contributed to this story.