A female student from Florida has been arrested and charged as an adult after she won the homecoming queen contest at Tate High School.
Emily Rose Grover was only 17 when she was arrested in March after she hacked the school’s voting system with her mother, an assistant principal at Bellview Elementary School.
After she turned 18 in April, she and her mother Laura Rose Carroll, 50, have been slammed with multiple felony charges, including fraud and computer hacking.
If convicted, the teen faces 16 years behind bars.
Assistant State attorney John Molcahn told the Pensacola News Journal: “This is not unusual with young people of that age.
“Juvenile (court) cannot do anything or supervise them after they become 18, and it just makes better sense to move them into adult court where they can be supervised effectively.”
Molcahn also said that even though the teen has been charged as an adult, she could still be given a lenient juvenile sentence.
Florida officials said that Carroll, an assistant principal at Bellview Elementary School, and her daughter have used the school district’s internal system to cast fraudulent votes for the teen so she would become the homecoming queen.
But an investigation found unauthorized access into hundreds of student accounts and the district’s student council coordinator was later informed that Grover had bragged about using her mother’s account to cast votes, the News Journal reported.
Investigators then discovered that hundreds of votes for the school’s homecoming court were fraudulent. Officials also found out that 117 votes came from the same IP address.
Evidence of unauthorized access to the system were linked to Carroll’s computers and cellphone.
According to reports, there were 246 votes cast for homecoming court from her devices.
Grover was expelled from school and had her title renounced. She is scheduled to be arraigned on May 14. She was freed on a $2,000 bond while her mother is free on $6,000.
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