Hungry-kid gap echoed at trial of 2 Arkansans accused of defrauding feeding programs

FILE PHOTO: Jacqueline Mills is flanked by relatives in April as she leaves the federal courthouse in Little Rock, where she is on trial, accused of defrauding U.S.-funded food programs for underprivileged children.
FILE PHOTO: Jacqueline Mills is flanked by relatives in April as she leaves the federal courthouse in Little Rock, where she is on trial, accused of defrauding U.S.-funded food programs for underprivileged children.

About 20 people testified Wednesday in the ongoing federal trial of two Arkansans accused of defrauding federally funded feeding programs for underprivileged children, confirming inaccuracies in reports that prosecutors say the defendants falsified to obtain millions of dollars.

The testimony came on the third day of an expected three-week trial for Jacqueline Mills, 41, of Helena-West Helena and Anthony Leon Waits, 38, of England. It followed that of more than a dozen witnesses who gave similar accounts Tuesday.

Mills and Waits are charged with wire-fraud conspiracy, while Mills is also charged with bribery and money laundering. Prosecutors have said Mills led, and Waits participated in, a multiyear conspiracy that bilked the government out of as much as $11 million in the name of helping hungry children in Arkansas.

Both maintain they did nothing wrong.

Among the witnesses who testified Wednesday was Rayfield Walker, who said he and his wife have operated the Walker Learning Academy in the Cross County town of Wynne for about four years.

Walker told jurors that Mills made a surprise visit one day in 2013 or 2014 to a city park where he and his wife were feeding children.

"She said she and her brother had a food program and that he prepared the food at his father-in-law's house," Walker said. Walker noted that the state doesn't approve private homes to be used as food preparation sites.

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He said Mills chatted with the Walkers about child care and toured their recently remodeled food-preparation facility. Then, he said, she asked him to write a letter on her behalf saying that he had allowed her and her brother to prepare food at the Walkers' state-approved preparation site.

Walker said he refused "because it was illegal."

Karen Williams of Helena-West Helena testified that in 2013 and 2014, she accepted a fellow church member's invitation to volunteer to help feed needy children at the church during the summer.

Williams told jurors in U.S. District Judge James Moody Jr.'s Little Rock courtroom that she helped out every weekday during those two summers. She said she would use a van to pick up some children from their homes and take them to the Silver Cloud church about 8 a.m., while other children were dropped off at the church by their parents or walked from nearby homes. Altogether, she said, there were usually 20 to 30 children there a day, and most of them stayed the entire day.

The children were served breakfast and lunch and were encouraged to participate in adult-supervised activities that lasted until about 3 p.m., Williams testified. She said the church member who asked her to help was Mills' sister, and the food was delivered by Mills' mother, Rosie Farr.

When a prosecutor showed Williams records of the number of children that Mills reported feeding at the church during that time, Williams said there were never 170 children, or 163 children, fed in one day as the records said. She said she knew most of the kids and checked their names as they showed up for meals. She said Farr took the records somewhere at the end of each day.

Tonique Hatton of North Little Rock, a former state Department of Human Services employee who was indicted alongside Mills, has testified that she helped Mills destroy original attendance records from some of the 34 sites Mills claimed to operate.

Hatton said the records included names picked randomly out of old school yearbooks and that after the women were indicted, Mills wanted the records destroyed so authorities couldn't ask the children listed if they actually attended the food program. Hatton also testified that she helped Mills create new "old" records to correspond with the numbers of kids Mills had listed as fed on claim forms.

Among the witnesses jurors heard from Wednesday was Sally Luckett of Helena-West Helena, who said she occasionally volunteered to help Mills, a fellow church member, serve food to poor children at a city park in the summer of 2012. But despite being designated on paperwork as Mills' "site supervisor," Luckett said she helped out only for about an hour and a half on occasion, not every day. She noted that she had another full-time job.

Asked about Mills' reports of feeding around 170 kids at the site every day, Luckett said she never saw that many kids "on the days that I was there." Instead, she testified, she only fed "anywhere from 20 to 40" children.

Jurors also heard from Barbie Washburn of Marvell, an assistant to the mayor. She testified that every summer, a nondenominational youth group from Minnesota travels to Marvell for a week to paint and repair houses and run an afternoon Bible school for children in the community.

Washburn said someone approached her in the summer of 2013, asking to provide lunch for the children who visited the Bible school, and she agreed. But, asked if up to 185 kids were fed there in one day as Mills reported, Washburn replied, "Goodness gracious, no!"

She said 20 to 40 kids from the community would attend the summer camp that was put on by the out-of-town high schoolers, with "maybe 50 on Thursdays," the busiest day.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture funds child-nutrition programs in several states, providing reimbursement to feeders based on the number of children fed. The nutrition programs, administered by the state Department of Human Services, include an after-school component during the school year and a summer program.

The trial will be in recess today and will resume at 9 a.m. Friday.

Metro on 03/30/2017

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