Public Defender from Upland Charged with Social Security Theft

The United States Attorney's Office said Wednesday the woman is charged with a fraud scheme that spanned over a dozen years, and netted her more nearly $130,000.
An Upland woman who has represented alleged criminals in the Riverside County court system is now facing serious allegations herself.

60-year-old Audrey Owens, a deputy public defender for the county, surrendered to federal authorities Wednesday, and appeared before a federal magistrate at the U.S. District Court in downtown Riverside.  After posting a $25,000 property bond, she was released from custody.
The attorney– who now faces up to 10 years in federal prison– is accused of taking a total of $129,795 in social security benefits from a bank account that belonged to her dead grandmother, according to federal affidavit.

The U.S. Attorney's Office alleges Owens collected her grandmother's social security payments for more than 12 years, from June 2000 through August 2012.

"After her grandmother’s death, Owens changed the address of a joint account she shared with her grandmother and continued to receive social security payments intended for her grandmother," a press release from the U.S. Attorney's Office said.  "Owens allegedly used these social security payments to pay bills and to pay expenses that included contributions to the Riverside County Employee Campaign."

Owens came to the attention of the Office of the Inspector General for the Social Security Administration last summer, after agents confirmed that SSA retirement insurance benefits had been deposited into a bank account shared by the defendant and her grandmother, Pollie Gayden, who died in May 2000, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office.
Prosecutors said the SSA ran a check on Gayden's status when records showed she had passed 100 years of age. Benefits abruptly stopped last September when the government received a copy of the woman's death certificate, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office.
Owens allegedly told investigators that she believed the money being deposited into the Kansas City bank account was from her father's veterans' benefits, not Social Security.
"I don't want to go to jail," the woman allegedly told social security investigators, according to court documents.  "I don't want my career destroyed...I'm happy it's done with... I've had lots of sleepless nights over this"
The deputy public defender said she used the funds to cover health care- related expenses for her father, an Alzheimer's patient, but also acknowledged using the money "for her own needs, such as for rent and utility bills," court papers allege.
Her father died in December 2006.
"She knew at the time that it was wrong to take and spend what she believed constituted (her father's) VA funds after his death; however, she did so anyway," the complaint alleges.
The items for which Owens allegedly wrote a check out of the shared account included a $300 contribution to the Riverside County Employee Campaign, a booster group for the roughly 17,800 people employed in county government.
The defendant is due back in U.S. District Court in Riverside on July 17.


– City News Service contributed to this report.