A Chula Vista woman previously convicted of embezzling from her employer and then faking a cancer diagnosis to avoid going to prison was sentenced Thursday to more than two years in prison for falsely representing to a prospective employer that she’d been exonerated in her criminal case.<\/p>\n
Ashleigh Lynn Chavez had been sentenced to prison for taking over $160,000 from a former employer, then later submitting forged doctor’s letters to a judge that recommended she serve time in home confinement rather than prison due to her supposed cancer diagnosis.<\/p>\n
After her release from custody, she submitted a forged letter — supposedly written by her defense attorney — in a job application that fraudulently claimed she’d been exonerated in the criminal case and prosecutors dismissed all charges against her.<\/p>\n
The letter appeared to be written to Chavez from her attorney and in it, the “attorney” advised Chavez that her court records had been sealed so she shouldn’t share them with anyone, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.<\/p>\n
Chavez had also been fired by a nonprofit after they discovered her convictions through a background check, but prosecutors say Chavez submitted a forged recommendation letter as part of her job application that was supposedly written by the nonprofit’s CEO.<\/p>\n
Chavez later pleaded guilty to new fraud charges.<\/p>\n
Her attorney, Benjamin Kington, argued in sentencing papers that after “unsurprisingly” experiencing difficulty securing new employment due to her convictions, Chavez created the false letters as part of her job application.<\/p>\n
However, he said the letters were never read by her employer and had no bearing on her hiring. Her prior convictions did not appear on the company’s background check and she was instead fired after a co-worker saw a press release about her convictions, Kington wrote.<\/p>\n
Rather than commit the crime for exorbitant profit, Chavez only did so to secure a job, which she worked at for more than three months for a standard salary, he wrote.<\/p>\n
Chavez was sentenced Thursday to 14 months in prison in the new fraud case, as well as a consecutive 12 month sentence for violating the terms of her supervised release in her prior cases.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A Chula Vista woman previously convicted of embezzling from her employer and then faking a cancer diagnosis to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":490810,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[3552,74,76,75],"class_list":["post-490809","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-diego","tag-crime-and-courts","tag-san-diego","tag-san-diego-headlines","tag-san-diego-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/490809","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=490809"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/490809\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/490810"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=490809"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=490809"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=490809"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}