Paying child support after a nasty divorce is every father’s worst nightmare, especially when they don’t even have custody of their children or allowed to see them at free will. A father of two from Florida who owed at least $500,000 in child support mysteriously vanished into the ocean on his paddle board the same day he was supposed to appear in court to explain why he hadn’t managed to pay a single child support bill since 2014.
Close family and friends fear that he may have taken his life or had a stress-induced heart attack in the ocean for being unable to pay the exorbitant child support bill of half a million dollars.
Mysterious Disappearance
Floridian authorities have put up notices everywhere asking people to help them find a man named Constantine Theoharis, who vanished mysteriously after taking his paddle board into the ocean early in the morning. Police officers are suspicious that the 52-year-old Floridian, who worked as a real estate agent, may have committed suicide or escaped to avoid paying half a million dollars that he owed his wife in child support.
Authorities are saying that it is highly unlikely that Theoharis’ disappearance wasn’t a coincidence since he was due in court the very same day that he vanished into the ocean. The real estate agent’s family members are extremely concerned about Theoharis’ safety and say that his disappearance is the worst nightmare they have ever experienced. While talking to ABC news, a worried cousin who hadn’t heard from the 52-year-old for days said that he wanted answers and demanded that the authorities find him as soon as possible.
A Case of Suicide?
The 52-year-old real estate agent was last spotted on March 20 as he paddled north into the Atlantic Ocean on his blue paddle board around 6.30 in the morning. Fort Lauderdale Police Department released a statement saying that from video camera footage they could confirm that Theoharis had gone into the ocean, close to his Fort Lauderdale home, on the morning of his disappearance.
Three days after he was seen paddle boarding deep into the vast ocean, Theoharis’ cousin, Chris Damian, filed a missing person report with the local police. In the incidence report, he told the police that the last time he had spoken to his missing cousin was on the 18th of March, two days before the mysterious disappearance, after which he had gone completely silent.
Damian revealed that Theoharis was extremely stressed about the enormous child support bill which he wasn’t able to pay but despite his turbulent relationship with ex-wife, he didn’t seem suicidal. Both cousins talked on the phone almost every day but not even for an instance did Damian suspect that Theoharis would take his own life to escape child support payments.
Weighing Out Possibilities
According to court records, Theoharis owes at least $549,000 to his ex-wife who has custody of their two daughters and has been fighting over alimony payments with the real estate agent since August 2014, when he stopped paying the monthly child support bill. The two had divorced in 2008 but their relationship had been turbulent even since, putting Theoharis under a lot of stress and depression.
Damian says that there could be a possibility that his cousin simply disappeared across the boarder of the United States to avoid nonpayment charges, but the authorities don’t have any evidence to prove this theory. Moreover, the 52-year-old left all of his belongings including his passport, phone, laptop and wallet at home which isn’t something a man would do if he were planning to escape the country.
According to Damian, Constantine Theoharis was a skilled paddleboarder who often took his paddle board into the ocean so it’s highly unlikely that he drowned unintentionally unless he had a heart attack in the ocean because of all the stress he had been experiencing lately due to his marriage and child support payments. Furthermore, the 52-year-old was also under pressure because of work and having to look after his parents who were both suffering from dementia.