DALLAS (CBSDFW.COM) – Dallas County Sheriff’s Office supervisor Umeka Treymane Myers has pleaded guilty to embezzling over $250,000 from the jail’s commissary fund.
According to U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Texas Chad E. Meacham, between 2018 and 2021 Myers fraudulently issued dozens of credit cards that she used in Texas, Louisiana, Nevada, Maryland and New York.
The 49-year-old worked as a supervisor at the Lew Sterrett Justice Center’s inmate property vault, which refunds inmates’ commissary account balances when they are released.
When an inmate’s account has more than $30, property vault employees such as Myers give them the balance on debit cards generated by software.
If an employee makes an error processing a debit card, the software creates an error message that can only be cleared by a supervisor. In this case, it was Myers.
After overriding a debit card error, Myers used released inmates’ book-in numbers to create new and duplicate cards. Myers would then enter the same amount from the card issued to the released inmate on the newly created card, Meacham said.
Myers faces up to 10 years in federal prison.