Sorry, Wrong Social Security Number

The old Buick was up on a rack and Chuck Rose was standing beneath it, waiting for the last of the motor oil to drip into a container. The car’s front brakes were shot, he was saying, and its rear brakes were going. He would finish changing the oil, put the tires back on and tell the owner.

“It’s actually in pretty good shape,” he’d say later, listening to the hum of the engine. New oil had been added by then and the radiator and windshield wiper fluid checked. Rose finished the paperwork and then, trying to smile, looked at me.

“I don’t know whether they’ll come and drag me away or what,” he said, suddenly changing the subject, and you could tell by the worried look in his eyes that he was expecting the worst. Maybe they’d smash in his front door with one of those tank-mounted battering rams, the way they did back in the LAPD era of Daryl Gates.

A soft-spoken, almost painfully pleasant guy, Rose was actually more than worried. He was under the kind of stress a wanted man feels when he knows the law is on his tail. At 62 with an artificial heart valve, stress, as you can imagine, isn’t what he needs right now.

The D.A.’s office was after him to pay $49,832.99 in back child support. Rose was aware they weren’t going easy on deadbeat dads these days, but he wasn’t in that category. He’s been married to the same woman for 42 years and their youngest offspring is 35 and doesn’t need his support. They had the wrong Charlie Rose.

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I met Rose at Reynolds Buick in West Covina, where he works two days a week. He actually retired eight years ago because of the heart problem but likes to keep his hand in as a mechanic.

He and his wife, Shirley, came here from Confluence, Pa., just after they got married and moved to a place in El Monte where they raised three children, none of whom he has ever abandoned.

The trouble began last December when Rose received that notice from the D.A. saying he owed almost $50,000 in back child support payments. He didn’t know whether to laugh or cry but did know he wasn’t the Charles Rose they were after. His kids, as he liked to say, were “all growed up” and he didn’t have any others hidden anywhere.

He began trying to call the 800 number listed on the notice but couldn’t get through. I tried the number later and sat through 24 “All of our agents are busy” recorded messages before hanging up.

Rose says he called 50 times without success and finally sought help from the Reynolds company’s personnel manager, Ruth Sussman. After hours on the phone she finally reached a Ms. Jones who chuckled pleasantly and agreed that a mistake had been made. Rose was to fax her a copy of his Social Security card and driver’s license and it would all be taken care of.

The Wanted Man breathed a sigh of relief and went out for a game of golf. But the notices kept coming.

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Anyone who has ever been trapped in a governmental system knows how that goes. I knew a man once who was incorrectly declared dead by the Social Security Administration and they wouldn’t believe he was still alive even when he showed up at their door breathing and yelling.

Rose and Sussman kept calling but they never could get Ms. Jones again and were beginning to believe that maybe it was a fictitious name and no one had actually received copies of the stuff they had faxed her.

He wrote a formal letter pleading once more “You have the wrong person!” and another that begged for them to “Please correct this immediately!” There were tear stains on the stationery, but from the D.A.’s office, silence.

The last demand for payment came on March 10 with an interest-fattened total due of $50,451.35. By now, Rose was about ready to go to jail rather than make any more phone calls. He figured he and Sussman had spent 20 hours trying to straighten the thing out.

One of the advantages of being a newspaper columnist is you can usually get to someone who will listen. After going through a couple of people I reached Mike Botula, a spokesman for the D.A.’s Bureau of Family Support.

They knew it was an error and had been working on it since Rose made that first contact. The State Franchise Tax Board, one of the D.A.’s sources of information, had given them the wrong Social Security number and it turned out to be not the deadbeat dad but easygoing, heaven-pure Chuck Rose.

It’s all straightened out now, Botula assured me. “Your guy is off the hook. There’ll be no more dunning notices.”

We’ll see. I’m never convinced that any governmental agency is going to straighten anything out. The guy they thought was dead? He finally gave up and stayed bureaucratically dead for years and then actually did die sometime later. By then he was declared alive.

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Al Martinez can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com