Grandmas Gone Wild

Two stories out of the Sacramento area have me wondering if there's something in the air besides the smoke coming from all those wildfires.

Thankfully, the two Grandma's who have gone wild have not gone the shirt lifting wild, instead they've gone the thieving wild.

The first story involves a Rocklin, California woman named Valerie Harris who was called the "Grandma Bank Robber."

During the early stages of the investigation, the task force dubbed the perpetrator “the grandma bank robber” because surveillance photos depicted the robber to be between her early 50s and early 60s.

Harris brandished a “Colt 454 Cowboy Style Pistol”during commission of a December 12, 2007 bank robbery at the U.S. Bank located inside the Safeway grocery store in Roseville, California. On December 18, 2007, HARRIS was arrested based on a citizen tip that she attempted to pay a debt with bank robbery loot. During the course of the investigation, the FBI uncovered additional fraud crimes committed by Harris . She also pleaded guilty to executing a fraudulent scheme to defraud Bank of America by cashing stolen and forged checks.

The Second story being prosecuted by the Sacramento United States Attorneys' Office involves a 74 year old woman from Stockton, California who plead guilty this week to stealing thousands of dollars in Social Security benefits.

Ramona Soto, a/k/a Feliciana Cortez Castro, is an undocumented alien from Mexico who came to the United States around 1960. Sometime around 1968 she somehow obtained a birth certificate of a United States citizen which she used to apply for a social security card. In 2000, Soto applied for and began receiving benefits from the Social Security Administration to which she was not entitled as an undocumented, illegal alien.

What is perplexing to me is that in the time that Soto has been in the United States there have been amnesty programs which she certainly should have qualified for, why she choose to live a charade and defraud the U.S. Government go beyond reason.