Section 8 Tenant Gets 6-23 Months In Jail For Scoring Housing Subsidy While Doing 2 To 5 Year Stint In State Prison For An Unrelated Crime & Failed To Tell Local Housing Authority

In Norristown, Pennsylvania, The Mercury reports:

• A Pottstown woman has admitted to stealing nearly $15,000 in federal housing and utility assistance funds by continuing to improperly collect the assistance even though she was in prison and no longer living at her residence.
  
  Alisha Latrece Harmon, 28, [...], was sentenced [] in Montgomery County Court to six to 23 months in the county jail after she pleaded guilty to a felony charge of theft by deception in connection with the fraud that occurred between November 2012 and September 2014. Judge Steven T. O’Neill, who accepted a plea agreement in the case, also ordered Harmon to complete two years’ probation for a total of four years of court supervision.
  
  With the charges, authorities alleged Harmon fraudulently collected 17 housing assistance payments, totaling $13,252, and nine utility assistance payments, totaling $1,665, by deceiving officials that she was still living at [her] Queen Street residence when in fact she was in state prison on a 2012 conviction for intimidating a witness.
  
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  The judge ordered Harmon to pay a total of $14,917 in restitution to the Montgomery County Housing Authority.
  
  The theft could represent a violation of the prison sentence Harmon received in September 2012 in the intimidation case and Harmon will remain detained until she has a hearing before the state parole board.
  
  Harmon, according to court papers, was granted rental housing assistance in August 2008, while living at [her] Queen Street residence with her toddler daughter, through the Housing Choice Voucher Program, also known as Section 8. Under the program, Harmon was required to notify the housing authority of any change of address or composition of her home.
  
  In September 2012, Harmon, then 24, was sentenced to 2 to 5 years in state prison for using Facebook to intimidate a witness to an attempted murder and shooting that was committed by her onetime boyfriend. While Harmon went to prison another relative moved in to the home to care for Harmon’s daughter and Harmon never reported the situation to housing assistance officials, court papers indicate.

For more, see Pottstown woman jailed for $15K theft of HUD funds.