Ex-Antioch community services officer pleads guilty in college degree fraud scandal

SAN FRANCISCO — In the first federal guilty plea to come since the wide-ranging indictments of current and former East Contra Costa cops, an ex-Antioch community services officer has pleaded guilty to a federal fraud charge.

Samantha Genoveva Peterson pleaded guilty to a charge of conspiring to fraudulently receive pay bumps through a city incentive program offered to Antioch and Pittsburg officers who obtained college degrees. Peterson and five others were charged in August with paying another person to take tests in their names in order to obtain degrees and pay raises they didn’t earn.

Peterson’s guilty plea was part of an agreement with federal prosecutors, the details of which were filed under seal. She is set to be sentenced in April. The fraud conspiracy charge carries a maximum of 20 years, but her actual sentencing recommendation will probably be far lower than that.

It was the fraud investigation that eventually steamrolled into a massive, wide-ranging criminal probe examining alleged crimes by more than a dozen officers, which resulted in federal and state charges against 14 Antioch and Pittsburg cops. The charges against other officers ranged from accepting tequila bottles as bribes to quash traffic tickets to violent alleged civil rights violations and interference with an ongoing murder investigation.

Peterson is the second of 14 to plead guilty. Last month, former Antioch and Pittsburg Officer Timothy Manly Williams pleaded no contest to the tequila bribery charges in state court. He also faces still-pending federal charges.

Peterson only faced charges related to the alleged college degree fraud scheme. Charges are still pending against her co-defendants, identified in court records as former Antioch Officer Moteza Amiri and former Pittsburg officers Patrick Berhan, Brauli Rodriguez Jalapa, Ernesto Mejia-Orozco and Amanda Theodosy-Nash.