New Documentary Indicts Child Support

On Feb. 4, 2005, David Hernandez Arroyo Sr., wearing a flak jacket and bullet-proof vest, shot and killed his ex-wife with an AK-47 assault rifle on the steps of the Smith County Courthouse in Tyler, Texas. He also shot his adult son in the legs, and killed a bystander who rushed in to help the victims. He then fled in his truck, giving rise to a police chase during which he was shot and killed. Two deputies and a police officer were also wounded in the courthouse attack.

Tyler, Texas, about 100 miles east of Dallas, is the self-proclaimed Rose Capital of the Nation, and is the home of the Texas Rose Festival, held each October. The courthouse is located on Tyler's historic town square.

It seemed an unlikely place for such a rampage. And the trigger for the attack seems unlikely, too. Arroyo's ex-wife and son were at the courthouse for a hearing on Arroyo's alleged failure to pay child support after the couple's divorce the year before.

Filmmaker Angelo Lobo uses dramatic video of the incident to open his new documentary, Support? System Down, which was screened last week in New York City. We don't know why Arroyo erupted, but Lobo suggests that Arroyo was a victim of a tragically dysfunctional child-support system that corrupts fathers' relationships with their children and presents them with bills they cannot pay.

Lobo's reporting is spotty. In interviews with fathers, attorneys, and fathers' advocates, he presents a powerfully emotional case for the problems inherent in child support systems, not only in Texas but across the nation. But he sometimes uses examples-such as the Tyler shootout-that might not withstand the interpretation he gives them. According to some reports, Arroyo had a history of spousal abuse. Perhaps the child-support hearing triggered some deeper hatred or distress that led to the shootings. We can never know.

But Lobo raises some disturbing issues. While the child-support system places little or no demand on custodial parents (usually mothers), it often places unreasonable demands on fathers. He reports on a roofer who is more than $200,000 in arrears in child support, a debt the man can never repay. (We are not given the details of the situation, so we don't learn how he fell so far behind.) Another father talks about the bumper falling off his aging compact car as he arrives at his ex-wife's house, only to find that she's just bought a new car. He says he makes $100,000 a year but cannot afford his child-support payments.

Lobo questions a system in which children are given to one parent or another, rather than encouraged to split their time between both parents. He charges--a charge that I will explore in a future posting--that states can earn money from the federal government by establishing tough child-support regulations. And he says that many fathers are jailed for being only a few thousand dollars behind in their child support--another charge I hope to examine in a future posting.

Lobo doesn't give us enough information about any of the cases he presents to allow us to make our own judgments about the fairness questions he raises. But the audience--including many who said they'd been victims of an unfair child-support system--was clearly moved.