Lottery Winner Loses in Child Support Case

Amador Granados may be wishing he had taken a lump-sum cash payment on his lottery winnings eight years ago.

The Anaheim resident, who won an $11-million SuperLotto jackpot, is a deadbeat dad, say officials at the Orange County district attorney’s family support division.

So the agency went to a sure source--the $561,000 a year in winnings he collects from the State Lottery Commission--to recover past-due support.

On Monday, the prosecutor’s office said it has garnered $109,608.53 from Granados’ windfall for unpaid child support to his former girlfriend, Marie Sanchez, for their son, now 11. The mother and the son live in Arizona and are on welfare, said Tori Richards, the district attorney’s spokeswoman.

This is not the first time the family support division has gone after a lottery winner. In the mid-1990s, prosecutors pursued another such deadbeat dad, said Senior Assistant Dist. Atty. Jan Sturla, who heads the division.

“He also was getting over half a million dollars a year,” he said, “and his lawyer was saying he was getting bad investment advice. I said he needs to invest on his child support obligations.”

Hitting at those who fail to make child support payments, authorities often take portions of wages and other regular income directly from employers and other payers because receipts are reliable and the process is simple.

Granados, 39, won the jackpot in 1991. He had been paying $210 a month in child support, but Sanchez sued for higher payments when she learned he had won the lottery, Richards said.

After a long legal battle, a judge increased Granados’ obligations to $3,056 a month in 1993, but three years later, he simply stopped paying, Richards said. The only money Sanchez has received since then was Granados’ $3,081 state tax refund last year.

Granados, a former landscaper who also owns a house in Costa Mesa, could not be reached for comment Monday.

Prosecutors said they did not know why he stopped paying up.

Sturla said that a long string of creditors were waiting to collect on Granados’ winnings, so prosecutors obtained a court order making child support payments a priority over the other debts.

Sturla said that if Granados continues to skip the payments, his office will again go after his lottery money.

“It clearly shows . . . an indifference to the payment of child support,” he said. “And I think that indifference is intolerable.”