Ex-CPD commander sentenced for pocketing dead mom's Social Security checks
Photo: GETTY
CHICAGO - A retired Chicago police commander has been sentenced to six months of community confinement after allegedly stealing his dead mother’s Social Security checks for years.
Kenneth Johnson avoided a prison sentence Tuesday when a federal judge ordered him to confinement as a condition of two years of probation.
The judge said “you need to feel your liberty confined,” but he noted Johnson has a chronic illness and is “not a lost cause to society,” the Chicago Sun-Times reported.
Prosecutors charged Johnson last year with stealing $363,064 in Social Security funds from June 1994 to November 2017.
Johnson shared a bank account with his mother and continued taking Social Security payments after she died in 1994, prosecutors said.
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He spent her benefits on hotels and airfare and even withdrew hundreds from a police station ATM, prosecutors said.
In a court filing, prosecutors said that for 23 of Johnson’s 32 years with CPD, “Johnson was committing a federal crime every single month.”