The son of the director of the Arizona Department of Public Safety avoided being arrested this week by making a child support payment.
Court records show that a bench warrant was issued for Robert Halliday, 31, (who shares the name of his veteran cop dad,) after he failed to appear for a telephone meeting last week with the mother of two of his children. The warrant was quashed this week after Halliday paid $5,000.
This was the third time a warrant has been issued for his arrest in the long-running struggle to get him to pay child support to the mother, Tamura Caskey of Pennsylvania, records indicate.
Halliday's had a bit of a troubled past, having been convicted of solicitation to commit aggravated assault in 2001 and criminal damage in 1998.
We mentioned his role in a fight with his sister, Ami Halliday, in a feature article last year. The article detailed the sordid mess that erupted into a highly questionable internal investigation targeting a DPS officer who dated Ami Halliday, and her father's role in a complaint involving his daughter. The officer, Geoff Jacobs, lost his lawsuit this year against Director Halliday and his daughter.
Caskey, 32, called us this week to tip us off and kvetch about her ex-boyfriend, who she says still owes her more than $10,000. Their children are now 10 and 11.
"Bobby and I went through a lot of rough patches," says Caskey, who moved the East Coast with the kids in 2001. "I got out of the situation."
Caskey says her ex-boyfriend approved the move, but that it's been tough to get him to pay the court-ordered child-support payments.
It seems that having a top cop as a dad is no guarantee of producing a law-abiding kid -- not in the Valley, anyway.
Gilbert Police Chief Tim Dorn, who's now making a name for himself by flouting Arizona's new medical marijuana law, has a daughter who's serving a six-year prison sentence for aggravated DUI.
Scottsdale Police Chief Alan Rodbell's daughter Cody was arrested in a 2007 DUI case that made headlines. Less than a month later, she was arrested again in what Arizona Republic writer Carol Sowers described as a hair-pulling, shirt-ripping brawl.
Rodbell's son Michael Rodbell was arrested in 2007 on suspicion of pot possession and speeding. He violated his parole in that case in 2008 with another pot violation, and also got a DUI that year, records show.
And, as avid New Times readers know, the son of state Senate President Russell Pearce, Joshua Pearce, was recently sentenced to a year in prison for violating the terms of probations in his 2007 aggravated DUI case.
