CHICAGO – A former employee of the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services has been charged in federal court with stealing more than $1 million meant for child care and gambling it on slot machines, according to a federal complaint unsealed last week.
Shauntele Pridgeon, 54, was employed as a Social Service Community Planner with the DCFS from 2015 to August of last year. She was tasked with reviewing and approving daycare providers for children under DCFS’ supervision, according to the complaint.
Over the course of multiple years, Pridgeon accepted bribes from numerous people in exchange for her favorable consideration of their applications to be childcare providers to children in foster care, the complaint alleges.
Between 2016 and 2022, a bank account belonging to Pridgeon and her husband received approximately $1.6 million in undisclosed payments from at least 12 different people who were registered with DCFS as childcare providers. The registered providers were receiving payments from DCFS at the time, and an FBI agent discovered many of the providers regularly paid out approximately half to Pridgeon, the complaint details.
The address of one of the providers Pridgeon claimed was providing child care was in fact a beauty salon, the complaint states.
At the same time, Pridgeon gambled “extensively” at a Chicago-area casino, primarily playing slot machines, and lost about $2.2 million from 2015 to 2022, the complaint says. She often paid her gambling-related expenses using the money from the childcare providers, the complaint said.
The Illinois Office of the Inspector General and Illinois State Police began investigating Pridgeon in August, at the request of her direct supervisor. The FBI joined the investigation in November.
A lawyer for Pridgeon and a spokesperson for DCFS did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
A preliminary hearing in the case is scheduled June 5, according to the office of the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois.
Illinois DCFS a long-beleaguered department
The news comes months after a federal class action lawsuit alleged the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services “willfully and wrongly” incarcerated hundreds of children in its care.
The suit filed in U.S. district court claims the department knowingly imprisoned kids despite court orders for their release, depriving the children of mental health resources, schooling, and access to loved ones and “compounding emotional and physical trauma.”
The department’s practice of wrongfully incarcerating children has been “public knowledge” for three decades, documented in “court orders, news reports and letters from informed officials,” according to a statement from law firm Loevy & Loevy at the time.
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