A 41-year-old Little Rock woman's 19-year criminal history weighed heavily against her Thursday at her sentencing for defrauding a government assistance program for poor families of about $250,000.
U.S. District Judge D. Price Marshall said he considered Keashia Davis' history of mental illness, suicide attempts and abuse suffered as a child in handing out a lower sentence than he had intended to give her, but that he felt she still deserved 10 years in prison -- 15 months above the penalty range recommended by national sentencing guidelines -- for defrauding the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program in Utah, Louisiana and Texas.
Davis pleaded guilty in March to 17 counts of wire fraud related to the U.S. Department of Agriculture program, which at that time reported a loss of $262,691. The total later shrank to about $245,000 -- the amount Davis now must pay in restitution -- after the USDA was able to "pull back" some of the funds it had dispersed to her through electronic benefit cards.
A little over a year ago, a USDA agent testified that while executing a search warrant at Davis' home at the Vantage Point apartments on Rebsamen Park Road, officers found 17 bags full of other people's Social Security numbers and dates of birth, mostly in notebooks she used to keep track of her elaborate scheme.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Jana Harris said the 17 fake identities that were used to support the individual wire-fraud charges were just examples investigators gleaned from hundreds of names and identifiers that Davis had painstakingly recorded by hand in the notebooks the agents found. Some of the names and Social Security numbers were real, while others were made up.
Davis used the information to trick Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program administrators in Utah, Louisiana and Texas into sending out benefit cards in those names that the government loaded once a month with varying amounts of money. Davis said she used the real estate app Zillow to find addresses of unoccupied homes for sale in those states, had the benefit cards mailed to those addresses, then had all the mail for those addresses forwarded to her Little Rock apartment.
Administrators in Utah became suspicious in June 2016 when they discovered that several benefit cards issued in response to online applications were being redeemed in Arkansas. Each state is supposed to issue the cards only to in-state residents.
Harris said records showed Davis invented names of up to four children for many of the false "recipients," to allow her to obtain the maximum amount of benefits each month on each card between April 2015 and May 2016. Harris said the notebooks allowed Davis to intelligently converse with administrators by phone about each "family member" for which benefits were sought, while ensuring each birth date was consistent in each conversation.
Some of the benefits on the cards were sold to other people, and some Davis used for herself, she admitted.
In the Little Rock apartment, where she lived with at least four of her children, who ranged from elementary age to adults, federal agents found mail, including a tax-refund check, that belonged to Davis' neighbors -- both there and at an earlier address on Chicot Road.
In a jail-recorded telephone call just after she was arrested, Davis asked an adult daughter to collect money from recently loaded cards to get money to bail her out and hire an attorney. She also speculated about receiving a probationary sentence and being released to the State Hospital, "because, you know, I have that mental illness."
Defense attorney Nicole Lybrand handed Marshall records documenting that Davis had been diagnosed over the years with mental health conditions, including being bipolar, and that Davis had first attempted suicide at age 17. Lybrand asked the judge to impose a 70-month sentence, below the suggested range of 84 to 105 months, saying that would allow Davis to receive extensive in-prison mental health treatment without being too harsh.
But Harris urged a longer sentence to deter Davis from committing future crimes and to protect the public. She cited Davis' history of fraud-related crimes.
Marshall declined to impose as much time as Harris sought, saying he believed Davis' mental-health issues were "driving the scheme in part."
But he said the amount of money involved, the fact that she stole from a program "designed to help the most vulnerable among us -- children and their families," and the amount of planning and work required to carry out the scheme showed "this couldn't be done by someone who wasn't bright and driven."
Metro on 09/08/2017