Attorneys Clayton Carlson (top) and Steven Schleicher (bottom) flank defendant Said Shafii Farah as they head into the courtroom on the 14th day of testimony in the Feeding Our Future trial. Photo by Nicole Neri/Minnesota Reformer.
An IRS investigator testified Monday that Feeding Our Future defendants submitted the names of thousands of children to whom they gave free meals during the pandemic, but he found they rarely matched the names of students enrolled in surrounding school districts, raising questions about whether the children were real. Other names were clearly made up or gibberish, and often showed up on rosters for multiple distribution sites, said IRS Special Agent Joshua Parks.
For example, the names Getsaname Hester, Serious Problem, Britishy Melony and Angel Albino showed up on multiple rosters submitted in order to get reimbursement from the federal government for pandemic meals.
But none of those names appear among the over 193,000 students enrolled in school districts near the defendants’ purported distribution sites.
“Serious Problem” was the most prevalent name on all of the rosters submitted by the defendants to the state for reimbursement during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Parks appeared in federal court Monday as a witness during prosecutors’ fourth week of testimony in the first trial related to the $250 million fraud of pandemic-era government food aid; 70 people have been charged.
The seven people currently on trial are charged with fraudulently claiming to have served over 18 million meals to children to get over $40 million in reimbursement, which prosecutors say they used to buy luxury cars, vacations, homes and jewelry — rather than food for children.
Parks said that in addition to identical names — including gibberish names — appearing at different sites, the defendants often submitted the same names to the state day after day, week after week, month after month — as though not one child ever failed to show up to get food.
“I wouldn’t expect a child to attend every single meal,” Parks said.
Out of the 3,027 names of children to whom the defendants claimed to give free meals, just 177 matched the over 193,000 students enrolled in 20 school districts surrounding the purported distribution sites.
For example, at a Bloomington site, Parks found just four out of the 999 names submitted to the state matched the names of the 10,302 students enrolled in Bloomington schools.
In the Shakopee school district, just 40 out of the 1,556 names defendants submitted for reimbursement matched, out of 9,688 enrolled students.
In St. Paul, just 62 out of the 1,094 names defendants submitted matched the names of 32,317 students.
Out of the 3,308 names submitted to the state purported to have received meals at the Dar Al-Farooq mosque in Bloomington, just 170 names matched those of the school district’s 10,302 students.
Parks also found 733 out of 1,001 names submitted by defendants as children receiving meals at a Minneapolis site were identical to the Dar Al-Farooq mosque site in Bloomington. The 1,003 names on an Apple Valley roster matched Dar Al-Farooq’s roster in 734 cases in the spring of 2021.
And five sites had 122 of the same names in April 2021.
$180,000 worth of textiles from China
Earlier Monday, IRS special agent Brian Pitzen finished testifying about texts and WhatsApp messages that showed the defendants spent considerable time communicating about how to divvy up the money, as opposed to the logistics of distributing 18 million meals.
Defense attorneys argued that Pitzen could have shown more photos and conversations about food defendants bought for the program. Steven Schleicher, attorney for Said Shafii Farah, said the defendants bought over $1 million in food, and showed a video of dozens of boxes of fruit and vegetables in what he said was a “partially full warehouse.”
Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph Thompson showed the jury food invoices with much smaller dollar amounts than what defendants spent on non-food purchases, like $180,000 worth of Chinese textiles.
Prosecutors also showed messages between Kara Lomen — who ran nonprofit Partners in Nutrition, which sponsored some of the defendants’ sites — and defendant Abdiaziz Shafii Farah, in which she alerted him that some of the same names appeared on two of his distribution sites. She also said a handful of the children were also enrolled and being claimed by a child care center.
“I just want you to pick which one you want them on,” wrote Lomen, whose name has repeatedly come up during the trial but has not been charged or indicted so far.
Lomen indicated she was bending the rules, saying she would give Farah time to correct the rosters “before anyone notices lol.”
“I feel really good about how we are protecting all of you though so that is worth it,” Lomen wrote.
The trial resumes Tuesday and is expected to last up to six weeks.
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