A 60-year-old Scottsdale, Arizona man was sentenced to two years in federal prison for willfully failing to pay more than $1 million in child support owed to his two children, a debt prosecutors say stretched back years and ballooned largely through unpaid interest. Evan Musikantow was sentenced Thursday in Chicago, after a federal jury convicted him in 2025 under a rarely used federal law aimed at parents who cross state lines to dodge court-ordered support.
U.S. District Judge John Tharp Jr. handed down the sentence, which also requires Musikantow to pay $1,092,561.80 in restitution. Prosecutors said he owed about $1 million in child support, with more than half of that figure made up of accumulated interest, according to the Chicago Sun-Times. The case was brought under the Deadbeat Parents Punishment Act, a statute the outlet describes as seldom used and specifically aimed at parents who cross state lines to avoid paying what courts have ordered.
The roots of the case trace back to Musikantow’s 2003 divorce, after which the Circuit Court of Cook County ordered him to make monthly payments to support his son and daughter. By 2017, he had paid only $3,132 in child support since the divorce, and most of that came from the State of Illinois intercepting his federal tax refunds rather than voluntary payments, the newspaper’s reporting shows.
Interest Piled Up as Payments Stalled
As of April 30, 2017, prosecutors said Musikantow owed $494,239 in support and an additional $199,091 in interest, a gap that only widened in the years that followed. A Cook County judge raised his required payments to $6,000 a month in 2015 and ordered law enforcement to bring him to court over the debt, the same reporting states. The following year, Judge Mark Lopez found Musikantow in contempt of court and ordered him jailed for six months over his failure to pay…