By
ROBRT MOORE
An identity-theft arrest of a Koch Foods employee Thursday is the sports equivalent of a slow, hanging curveball lobbed into the wheelhouse of Morristown City Council member Mel Tucker.
Tucker, the prime mover in a city council initiative designed to shift enforcement of some federal immigration laws to the Morristown Police Department, appears intent on hitting this offering way back.
The city council member says he plans to follow this case through the legal system in an effort to gain insight into whether Morristown companies are knowingly hiring illegal aliens.
The end of Thursday’s story is that a Koch Foods employee who identified herself as Lucia Perez was arrested at the chicken-processing plant in the East Tennessee Progress Center and charged with felony identity theft.
Perez had a company-issued photo ID card under the name of Julie Wheeler, according to MPD Detective Sgt. Randall Noe. Perez maintains she is 27. The real Julie Wheeler is 42.
Perez, a Mexican national, allegedly gave Wheeler’s Social Security number to Koch Foods human resources personnel when she was hired and assumed Wheeler’s identity, according to Noe.
The investigative trail that led to Perez’s arrest, however, began 1,100 miles away in the coastal hamlet of Swanville, Maine. That’s where Wheeler moved after she left Morristown in 2005. Wheeler, who says she qualified for disability benefits following a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress syndrome, received a troubling telephone call from the Social Security Administration earlier this week.
The SSA demanded that she repay $14,000 in disability payments. The reason that Wheeler owed the money is that Social Security records indicated that she had been working at Koch Foods in Morristown for the past two years. Wheeler says that she telephoned Koch Foods Thursday and asked a resources worker to write a letter to a Social Security office in Maine stating that she was not an employee. Wheeler alleges that a Koch Foods employee refused.
Tim Steffin, Koch Foods human resources manager, was unavailable for comment this morning. Noe says Koch Foods is cooperating with the investigation.
Wheeler says she strongly suspects that her former live-in boyfriend in Morristown, who Wheeler described as an illegal alien, stole her Social Security card during their relationship.
"The astonishing part of this is that (Perez) is obviously a Hispanic female and she was able to say that she is Julie Wheeler," Tucker said.
The city council member also says it’s hard for him to comprehend how the company could not have realized that Perez was not 42 years old.
"I have been saying that corporations here have been employing illegal aliens at very low wages, which in my opinion, has been depressing the wages for workers in Hamblen County," Tucker said this morning.
Tucker believes that this is the reason that the median family income actually dropped between 2000 to 2007.
It remains unclear whether Perez presented Wheeler’s Social Security card or just gave Wheeler’s Social Security number when she was hired at Koch Foods. Noe says he expects to learn that some time today.
"It will be gained either through cooperation or the legal process," Noe said this morning.
Noe asked that Perez be held without bond because he considers her a flight risk. Those convicted of identity theft face between two and four years in jail.
"That has resulted, in my opinion, in an insufficient disposable income for people to buy anything other than necessities here," Tucker added. "This resulted in an increase of the property tax of 40 percent last year."
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The disconnect between a Hispanic Koch Foods employee and a valid Social Security number, which surfaced with an identity-theft arrest at the Morristown chicken-processing plant Thursday, apparently wasn’t an uncommon phenomenon, suggest jail records.
Over the past two years, 39 Hispanics who identified themselves as Koch Foods employees have been booked into the Hamblen County Jail on a variety of charges, records indicate.
Only two gave corrections officers a Social Security number. The records did not indicate whether officers attempted to verify the numbers.
One of the workers, Juan Ramos Santiago, told corrections officers he was a citizen of Mexico, not the United States, according to jail records. The purported citizenship of the other man who gave a Social Security number, Jose Gregorio Vasquez, was not listed on his booking sheet.
Hamblen County jailers do not attempt to verify the places of employment for Hispanics or other inmates, so the possibility exists that the inmates could have lied about their connection to Koch Foods.
Tim Steffin, Koch Foods human resources manager, did not return telephone calls to comment. Other company officials were given the opportunity to comment but did not return calls.
Morristown Police Department Detective Sgt. Randall Noe, the lead investigator in the identity-theft case, says a Koch Foods human resources worker reported that Koch Foods visually verifies all prospective employees’ citizenship documents.
Noe said Koch Foods indicated the company does not keep copies of the qualifying documents — Social Security cards, alien-registration cards or passports — in employees’ personnel files.
Noe arrested 27-year-old Lucia Perez Thursday afternoon because she allegedly had assumed the identity of Julie Wheeler, a 42-year-old Maine resident who says her Social Security card was stolen when she lived in Morristown two years ago.
"It concerns law enforcement any time there is a perception that someone is breaking the law, whether it be federal or state law," Morristown Police Chief Roger Overholt said Saturday afternoon.
"Any time that these situations exist, we like to examine all the information to try to determine if there is a situation which warrants further investigation," the police chief added. "We know that it’s possible for undocumented individuals to obtain false documents and present them to employers."
Noe asked that Perez be held without bond because he considers her to be a flight risk. She was released from jail Friday after posting $10,000 bond.
All but three of the 39 listed said they were born in Mexico.
Only 12 of the 39 said they were U.S. citizens, and none of those who reported they were citizens possessed a driver’s license, according to jail records.
In fact, two of the three men who had Tennessee driver’s licenses, Santiago and Florentino Ramos, told jailers they were not U.S. citizens.
One man who told authorities he worked at Koch Foods, Julio S. Mendoza, had been deported two times under two different names, according to jail records.
He and 12 other Hispanics had known aliases. A man who sometimes went by Juventino Mendoza Aragon, tops the list. He has five known aliases reports indicate.
The Koch Foods Morristown plants, which employ more than 1,000 workers, have never been raided by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.
Immigration officers arrested dozens of illegal aliens at the Fairmont Street facility when it was Burnett Produce.
In late August, I.C.E. swarmed a Koch Foods chicken-processing plant in Fairfield, Ohio and arrested more than 160 suspected illegal immigrants, according to agency releases.
Simultaneously, agents executed search warrants at Koch’s Chicago headquarters.
The charges filed against the Koch employees in the sting include illegal re-entry to the United States, identity theft, document fraud, Social Security fraud and forgery.
Koch’s Ohio operations were targeted in a two-year federal investigation "based on evidence that Koch may have knowingly hired illegal aliens at its poultry processing and packaging facility," according to an I.C.E. press release.
