A Black man in Texas was stunned to learn this week that he has paid more than $10,000 in child support for a 5-year-old girl in Florida, unrelated to him, for the last three years, likely because his name and birth date are similar to those of the real father.
Rodrick Dwayne Davis, 45, of Dallas, told Atlanta Black Star that he received a letter from the Texas Attorney General’s Office of Child Support this week demanding $1,400 in overdue child support for a child in Florida. He was stumped, as he has no children in Florida and has never lived there.
He does have two daughters in Texas, now 18 and 23, for whom he’s been paying back child support for several years.
When he examined his pay stubs, he realized a third child was added to his garnished wages in January 2023, and that since then, Texas has taken $10,961 from his paychecks for her support.
Davis, who works as a national manager for a fine arts company and now earns more than $140,000 annually, said he hadn’t previously noticed the extra line item of $126 in each biweekly pay stub. He was aware he was paying more overall for child support, but chalked that up to the fact that he’s received pay raises over the last few years that put him into a higher tax bracket and just figured more was being deducted for his two girls.
After visiting the Texas AG’s website and doing some sleuthing online, Davis learned the name of and located the mother of the unknown child and initiated a call via Facebook Messenger.
She was just as dumbfounded as he was to learn that the wrong man had been financially supporting her daughter for three years, she told Atlanta Black Star.
“This is crazy,” said Shakida Harvey, 38, a clothing designer who lives in Lake Alfred, Florida. “Somehow, Florida and Texas linked these cases without verifying any identity or paternity information. This man has been paying diligently for my child all this time. What a mess.”
The real father of her child, she said, is Rodrick Deyun Davis, who is 44, and also has a September birth date. He lives in Mississippi and has never lived in Texas to her knowledge. She had been puzzled as to why she’d been receiving child support payments from Texas, but didn’t question it. Harvey does not communicate with her child’s father directly, she said, but her daughter talks to him and his mother via her own phone.
In an exasperated TikTok post about the situation on Wednesday, Harvey called him out for shirking his responsibility while another man unknowingly took it on.
“You’ve been giving your child’s father grace all this time because he’s been consistently paying,” she said. “He’s actually been a deadbeat and hasn’t said nothing, not a damn thing.”
Now Davis and Harvey are working together to try to rectify the situation.
Harvey called the Texas child support office this week to explain the identity mixup and to terminate her child custody case, she said, reminding them that she had provided court-ordered DNA samples for herself and her daughter when she applied for child support in Florida three years ago.
The Texas AG staff asked her for the name, birth date, contact information and photos of her child’s noncustodial father, which she provided.
“They should have asked me for this stuff three years ago,” she said. “They never validated anything, they just were so careless and went after the wrong man with a different middle name and birth date, and garnished his wages.”
Davis, meanwhile, visited the Plano office of the Attorney General’s Office seeking help. He said the staff there was able to pull up a profile of the real father, including a photo of Rodrick Deyun Davis with his hair in dreadlocks.
“That ain’t me!” Davis said. “I’ve always had a fade.”
The AG staff told Davis they would review and research his claim and escalate his case to upper management, but that would have to wait at least a few weeks to talk to someone.
“Y’all took my money expeditiously,” he said afterwards in a Facebook Live post. “Now you need to give it back. I ain’t trying to scam the system. I just want what’s mine. … How can the state of Texas get away with this?”
He warned other fathers who are paying child support to “Stay aware. You gotta watch these folks. … I got caught sleeping.”
Davis says he has contacted several attorneys who advised him that a civil lawsuit against the state of Texas was not likely to result in a monetary award beyond what he has paid out and perhaps the accrued interest on those funds. Their own retainer fees would cost at least $5,000, he said.
He said if he recovers what he’s erroneously paid to Texas, he’d like to invest it in a food truck, a side venture he’s been thinking about pursuing since he owned a restaurant years ago.
According to the Texas Attorney General website, Texas law requires a man who is questioning his legal relationship to a child to file a petition asking the court to terminate the parent-child relationship.
The court must hold a pretrial hearing and then, if it deems necessary, order the legal father and the child to submit to genetic testing. If the testing results say the legal father is not the biological father of the child, “the court may order a termination of the parent-child relationship and the financial support obligation. However, the man is still responsible for any unpaid child support and interest up to the termination date.”
The website does not cover its procedures when a man has been deemed the legal father due to bureaucratic bungling.
The Texas Attorney General’s Office did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Atlanta Black Star about how it would handle this or other mistaken paternity cases involving apparent administrative error.
