Man fakes COVID and his non-existent child’s death to skip work in Georgia, feds say
In the last year, Santwon Antonio Davis is accused of faking his nonexistent child’s death and a positive coronavirus test to get out of work.
When he lost his job, prosecutors said he turned to filing a fake mortgage application with a phony income and employment history.
It didn’t work.
Davis, 35, pleaded guilty on Monday to wire and bank fraud in federal court, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Georgia announced in a news release. As part of his plea agreement, prosecutors said they will push for a three-year prison sentence.
“Davis’ streak of lies ended when he took advantage of a pandemic to cause undue harm to the company he worked for and their employees,” Chris Hacker, Special Agent in Charge of FBI Atlanta, said in the release.
Prosecutors charged Davis in May with fraud, McClatchy News previously reported. But new allegations involving an earlier claim for bereavement and the fraudulent mortgage application submitted while he was on pretrial release prompted new charges this month, court filings show.
A false COVID-19 test
Georgia reported its first two cases of the coronavirus on March 2. By the end of the month, more than 1,000 residents in the state had contracted the virus, data show.
Around that time, investigators said Davis was working for an unnamed “national company” at a plant in Atlanta. The company announced March 12 that any employee who tested positive for COVID-19 would be given paid time off to quarantine, the FBI said in an an affidavit.
One week later, Davis reportedly received a call that his mother was exposed to a person who had tested positive for the virus. Davis lived with his mother at the time, prosecutors said.
A supervisor told Davis to continue working given his low risk of testing positive. But court filings state he didn’t show up for work the following day on March 20, telling the supervisor in a text message that his mother had developed symptoms overnight.
By the weekend, Davis reported his mother tested positive and that he was symptomatic. On Sunday, March 22, prosecutors said he claimed to have also tested positive and sent the plant manager a letter purporting to be from Wellstar Atlanta Medical Center Hospital South indicating he was excused from work.
But prosecutors said a human resource manager who looked at the letter noticed several inconsistencies.
The hospital discharge date was Nov. 10, 2019 — four months before he claimed to have tested positive, court filings state. The letter was also reportedly not signed and not on formal letterhead.
When someone from the company later called the hospital where Davis claimed to have been treated, a nurse told them it didn’t perform COVID-19 tests.
As the company tried to verify his test results, Davis continued to claim in phone calls with company representatives that he was showing symptoms and seeking treatment at the hospital. The company eventually fired him on March 25 after he failed to provide confirmation of his test results and stopped responding to attempts to contact him, prosecutors said.
Davis’s alleged lie cost the company more than $100,000 after it shut down the plant for cleaning and paid at least four employees in close contact with Davis to quarantine, court filings state.
More fraud claims surface
The alleged fraud on the company wasn’t Davis’s first, prosecutors said.
According to court filings, Davis claimed in December 2019 that his child had died in a car wreck. H reportedly received 40 hours of funeral pay after submitting fake documents for paid bereavement.
“This child never existed and was fabricated so that the defendant could obtain benefits to which he was not entitled,” prosecutors said in Monday’s news release.
After federal charges were filed against him, court filings state Davis also submitted a loan application to CalCon Mutual Mortgage LLC to purchase property in Georgia. The application reportedly contained someone else’s Social Security number, fake pay stubs from a company for which he no longer worked and fabricated bank statements.
“The mortgage company discovered the fraud, in part, after seeing the news stories related to his original COVID-19 charge,” prosecutors said.
This story was originally published December 15, 2020 at 5:56 PM with the headline "Man fakes COVID and his non-existent child’s death to skip work in Georgia, feds say."
