Former Dallas County Sheriff’s Office supervisor sentenced for embezzling over $250,000

James Hartley
·2 min read
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The Dallas County Sheriff’s Office supervisor who admitted to embezzling $250,000 from the county jail’s inmate population was sentenced to nearly three years in federal prison Monday, the U.S. Department of Justice said in a news release.

Umeka Treymane Myers, 50, was charged on April 28 and pleaded guilty in June to theft from a program receiving federal funds, according to the news release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Texas. She was sentenced by Chief U.S. District Judge David Godbey to 33 months in federal prison and ordered to pay $429,640.66 in restitution.

In her guilty plea, Myers said she was working as a supervisor at the Lew Sterrett Justice Center’s inmate property vault, which refunds inmates’ commissary account balances when they are released from jail. Property vault employees provide inmates with debit cards if their accounts contain more than $30 at the time of their release.

According to the news release from the Justice Department, any time an employee makes an error processing a debit card to refund an inmate, the software used to generate the card sends an error message that only a lead clerk or supervisor can clear.

In her role as a supervisor, the Justice Department said, Myers used the book-in numbers of released inmates to create duplicate debit cards, entering the same amount from the card issued to the released inmate, after overriding a debit card error.

Doing this, Myers admitted in her plea that she issued dozens of fraudulent debit cards between 2018 and 2021 and then used them in Texas, Louisiana, Nevada, Maryland and New York, according to the news release. Records from Winstar, Choctaw and Margaritaville casinos, Southwest Airlines and personal bank records, along with ATM surveillance footage, confirmed her spending.

The program from which Myers stole included money provided through federal funding, according to the news release.

Myers has been ordered to report to prison on Sept. 11.