DETROIT (WXYZ) - The State of Michigan is ordering a Detroit man to pay tens of thousands of dollars, or go to prison. The reason? He owes back child support for a child that everyone agrees is not his. "I feel like I’m standing in front of a brick wall with nowhere to go," said Carnell Alexander. He says he learned about the paternity case against him during a traffic stop in Detroit in the early 90s. The officer told him he is a deadbeat dad, there was a warrant out for his arrest.
“I knew I didn’t have a child, so I was kind of blown back,” said Alexander. The state said he fathered a child in 1987, and ignored a court order to pay up. It was the first Carnell had heard of the court order. He'd never even met the child. Eventually he, by chance, ran into someone he knew would know where the woman was, and got a DNA test. It proved what he had been saying all along: the child he had never met was not his.
The mother had realized that, and the real father was in the child's life. Alexander took this information to court. The judge was unmoved. Carnell's ex had a baby, and didn't know who the father was. She was struggling to care for the child. When she applied for state assistance, the case worker told her she had to name the father....