Paul Petersen's Marshallese co-defendant sentenced to prison for assisting in adoption fraud scheme
ANDREW FAVAKEH | Arizona Republic
A woman who assisted former Maricopa County Assessor Paul Petersen in operating an international adoption scheme was sentenced to two years in state prison.
Lynwood Jennet, 47, a native of the Republic of the Marshall Islands, had worked for Petersen for six years.
Jennet helped Petersen coordinate adoptions from the Marshall Islands to the United States. Once the women arrived in Arizona, Jennet was their translator, their driver as well as their medical contact, according to court documents. She also lived with them during their pregnancies in a house in Mesa owned by Petersen.
While Petersen charged each adoptive family $35,000 or more, Jennet provided false information to Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System, the state's Medicaid program for low-income residents. to pay for the births with tax dollars, according to court documents.
The birth mothers should not have qualified for AHCCCS benefits because they were not Arizona residents. Between November 2015 and May 2019, AHCCCS paid for at least 29 births, according to the Arizona Attorney General's Office.
Petersen will serve 15 years in prison for crimes connected to the decade-long international adoption scheme. He was charged with state crimes in Utah, Arizona and faced federal charges in Arkansas.
An Arizona Republic investigation published in April 2020 found 20 of the Marshallese women gave birth at Banner Gateway Medical Center in Mesa.
Marshallese citizens who have lived in the United States for fewer than five years are not eligible for Medicaid. It is illegal for Marshallese women to travel to the United States for the purpose of adoption. Petersen and his associates, including Jennet, lied about the residency status of birth mothers so they could illegally access the health-care benefits.
In April 2019, a social worker at Mercy Gilbert Medical Center contacted law enforcement after she noticed a birth mother listing the same person (Jennet) as her notary, emergency contact and interpreter, according to the Arizona Attorney General’s Office. The social worker told the detectives that she was the third woman in three weeks to be at the hospital under similar circumstances, according to the Arizona Attorney General’s Office.
A state grand jury indicted Jennet and Petersen in October 2019. Two months later, Jennet pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit fraudulent schemes and artifices, two counts of theft, and failure to file a tax return. Since December 2019, Jennet has been on house arrest and subject to electronic monitoring. She was taken into custody after the sentencing hearing Tuesday.
As part of Jennet’s plea agreement, she will pay $28,001.97 to AHCCCS and $6,591.00 to the Arizona Department of Revenue for failing to file a tax return, which is a Class 5 felony.
“Today's sentence demonstrates that if you defraud Arizona taxpayers, you will be held accountable,” Attorney General Mark Brnovich said in a statement Tuesday. “This investigation and successful prosecution concludes a model example of how local, state and federal law enforcement agencies can work together to serve their communities.”
The Arizona Department of Public Safety and special agents with Homeland Security Investigations investigated the case.
In December, a U.S. District judge in Arkansas sentenced Petersen to 74 months — just over six years — in federal prison for perpetrating illegal adoptions in what prosecutors called a "get-rich-quick-scheme ... hidden behind the shiny veneer of a humanitarian operation."
In March, he was sentenced in Maricopa County on fraud and forgery charges. He was ordered to serve 10.4 years on four charges, but all but five years were to run concurrently with the federal sentence.
In April, a Utah judge sentenced Petersen to serve one to 15 years in prison for human smuggling and communications fraud. That sentence will run concurrently with his federal and Arizona sentences.