LEE COUNTY, Miss. (WTVA) -- With a room full of investigators and deputies, planning began Tuesday night for a major undertaking the sheriff dubbed "Operation DBD", which stands for "deadbeat dad."
It's what deputies call a roundup; even though they have 24 warrants, there's no guarantee they'll get them all in one night.
"This is a last-ditch effort to try to collect child support that these individuals owe to chancery court," Lee County Sheriff Jim Johnson said. "The court has worked with them. They've tried to work out some type of payment, and they have exhausted all means [at their disposal]."
Four teams headed out to serve incarceration orders, which are essentially arrest warrants.
However, doing that becomes something of a cat-and-mouse game.
Deputies say the paperwork involved in this makes it harder. There is no search warrant given, only an incarceration order.
After no one answered the door to a Shannon barber shop, deputies quickly review their strategy and hit the road again.
When authorities arrive to a home in the southwestern part of the county -- listed as the last known address of one of those wanted -- nobody answers the door there, either.
"This has gone on so long, and these individuals have known about this, that a lot of your addresses are old," Johnson said. "A lot of people have moved. And that's what we've found out with these 24 cases we've got, the most recent ones."
The team WTVA News rode with didn't make any warranted arrests that night, unless you count the individual taken to jail for DUI refusal during the search.
Still, six were arrested by the other teams during a two-hour span Tuesday night.
That's one-fourth of those with warrants from the department.
Johnson says despite those numbers, he hopes their efforts send a message to those still at-large.
"You just have to remember, if you're going to be someone that's a parent who's responsible for bringing a child into this world, there's responsibilities for it that last," Johnson said. "You need to make sure that you're able to step up and accept that responsibility."
The sheriff says the department will post information about the 18 remaining individuals on its website in an effort to get more information on their whereabouts.
