Dad’s plan to dump 80,000 pennies in ex-wife’s lawn for last child support payment backfires: “You can learn a lesson from it”
A Virginia mother and daughter turned an act of spite into a gesture of goodwill.
Divorce can be a contentious and painful ordeal for couples, especially when children are involved. Not only is there battle for custody, but they must commit to help raise the children, if nothing else at least financially.
Typically, child support payments last until the last joint child reaches age 18. One Virginia man, who had been estranged from his daughter for years, tried to make a statement with his final child support payment which backfired.
“It’s your final child support payment”
Avery Sanford’s father chose to make a stunt out of his final child support payment of $800 this past June. He pulled up to the house where the 18-year-old was living with her mother and dumped the money on the pavement adjacent to the lawn in the form of 80,000 pennies.
When Avery’s mom, Raven Sickal, saw the truck with a landscaping trailer in tow back up to the lawn and a man get out, she went to investigate. Not recognizing the person, she asked what he was doing, to which he replied, “It’s your final child support payment.”
Avery explained to local news outlets that, “that’s when she realized who it was.”
The stunt didn’t go over well with his daughter. “It’s not just her that he’d be trying to embarrass. It’s also me, it’s also my sister. And it’s upsetting that he doesn’t really consider that before he did this,” Avery said.
Spiteful act turned into a gesture of goodwill
Avery and her mother decided to bring some good out of the spiteful act. After they finished shoveling up the pennies and turned them into a more manageable format, they donated all $800 to a nearby domestic abuse shelter, Safe Harbor.
“Turning around and donating that money to moms and children in need, I feel like that just really turns the situation into a positive one. You can learn a lesson from it,” Avery said.
The story of their act of goodwill prompted a flood of donations to Safe Harbor. “Our online donation page just blew up,” Mary Maupai, Safe Harbor’s development director, told ABC 7. She told the outlet at the time that the shelter had receive “over $47,000 worth of donations from locally, nationally, internationally -- as far as England and beyond.”
News of the tremendous outpouring of support made both Avery and her mom “very emotional,” Sickal said that she “sobbed” upon hearing about the donations. “This reach has been amazing and the thoughtfulness and kind gestures have been beyond anything we expected,” they wrote in a statement to the outlet. “We just wanted to turn this around and that’s exactly what we did.”
Father says he didn’t mean to estrange himself further from his daughter
The local CBS news station spoke with the father who told them 18 years of frustration had gotten the better of his emotions and that the last thing he had wanted to do was drive a further wedge in the relationship with his daughter.
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