A 60-year-old Scottsdale, Arizona, man was sentenced to two years in federal prison for knowingly failing to pay more than $1 million in child support owed to his two children, a debt that authorities say dates back years and has grown mostly due to unpaid interest. Evan Musikantow was sentenced Thursday in Chicago after a federal jury found him guilty in 2025 under a rarely used federal provision that targets parents who cross state lines to avoid court-ordered support.
U.S. District Judge John Tharp Jr. imposed the term, which also compels Musikantow to pay $1,092,561.80 in restitution. According to the Chicago Sun-Times, prosecutors estimated that he owed around $1 million in child support, with more than half of that amount made up of compounded interest. The case was filed under the Deadbeat Parents Punishment Act, which the outlet characterizes as a rarely utilized statute aimed primarily at parents who cross state lines to evade paying court orders.
The lawsuit began with Musikantow’s divorce in 2003, following which the Circuit Court of Cook County ordered him to pay monthly child support payments to his son and daughter. According to the newspaper, by 2017, he had only paid $3,132 in child support since the divorce, with the majority of that coming from the State of Illinois intercepting his federal tax refunds rather than voluntary payments.
According to authorities, Musikantow owes $494,239 in support and an extra $199,091 in interest as of April 30, 2017, a disparity that has only grown in the years thereafter. A Cook County judge increased his needed payments to $6,000 per month in 2015 and ordered law enforcement to bring him to court over the debt, according to the same source. The following year, Judge Mark Lopez found Musikantow in contempt of court and sentenced him to six months in jail for his failure to pay.
In 2018, a federal grand jury accused Musikantow for willfully failing to pay child support under the Deadbeat Parents Punishment Act. The Justice Department, in a statement from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Illinois, stated that Musikantow willfully failed to pay more than $1 million in child support from 2009 to 2017—a timeframe that differs from the Sun-Times account, which cites records indicating unpaid support dating back to 2008.
At the sentencing, Judge Tharp cited particular spending that undermined Musikantow’s claims of financial difficulties. He stated that Musikantow traveled to a casino in 2014 and wagered $11,000, winning an additional $3,000—money that was never used to support his children, according to the Sun-Times. Prosecutors also contradicted his claim of being broke, citing a 2022 federal tax return that showed $231,000 in gross income, as well as a Scottsdale home he bought for $660,000 in 2023.
Musikantow was not alone in receiving federal inquiry. According to numbers attributed to the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics, he was one of just six people charged in 2018 under the Deadbeat Parents Punishment Act. However, the scope of unpaid child support in Illinois is significantly more than any single case: the state’s unpaid child support totaled $2.6 billion as of June 2023, according to the same research.
Failure to pay child support is a separate offense under 18 U.S.C. § 228, as reported by GovInfo, the U.S. Government Publishing Office. The Congressional Research Service has stated that nonpayment of child support may result in incarceration under a state criminal nonsupport statute or prosecution under federal criminal penalties, but it does not state that incarceration is an automatic outcome in such cases.
Illinois has utilized various mechanisms to try to collect unpaid support before cases reach this level, such as the now-defunct Deadbeats Most Wanted List, from which the state collected more than $2 million through 2018, according to the Sun-Times. It is unclear from available records how much, if any, of the $1,092,561.80 restitution order Musikantow has paid since his Thursday sentencing. WGN-TV, which also covered the sentencing, cited the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Illinois as the agency that announced the case’s outcome.
Leave a Reply