Who is Ava Misseldine? Baker accused of stealing DEAD BABY's ID for $1.5M Covid-relief fraud
Ava Virginia Misseldine, 49, was arrested Thursday, June 9 by federal agents in Utah for stealing a dead infant’s identity and using it to obtain a job, a pilot’s license, a passport, admission to college, and, eventually, hundreds of thousands of dollars in Covid-19 bailout funds. She has been charged of passport fraud, Social Security number fraud, aggravated identity theft, and fraud in connection with an emergency, according to a federal criminal complaint obtained by Law&Crime.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Ohio said that Misseldine is accused of using an infant’s identity to obtain a passport, a student pilot license, a job as a flight attendant, admission into The Ohio State University, and pandemic relief loans among other things. Misseldine had been using her second identity under the name “Brie Bourgeois” since 2003.
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Who is Ava Misseldine?
This is not Misseldine's first rodeo with the law. In December 1997, Misseldine was sentenced to prison for theft, forgery, and escape in Ohio. She was released during the summer of 2000.
Misseldine in 2021 moved out west from Columbus, Ohio, where she ran a highly regarded organic bake shop reports The Daily Beast. One of Misseldine’s businesses, the Koko Tea Salon & Bakery, was featured on the Food Network’s 'The Best Thing I Ever Ate', for red velvet cupcakes made with beet juice rather than food coloring. Prior to that in a 2014 interview with Columbus Monthly, Misseldine portrayed herself as a former cancer researcher who grew up in Hawaii, where, as she told The Columbus Dispatch a year earlier, her family ran a generations-old tea business. Misseldine said she moved to Ohio to study chemical engineering at Ohio State University, and that she got into baking in 2011 to honor her beloved grandmother.
Ava Misseldine makes the best cupcakes imaginable @kokoteasalon #dishcrawl #gahanna pic.twitter.com/icmpyDnDKO
— Dishcrawl Columbus (@DishcrawlCol) June 13, 2013
In 2003, Missledine allegedly applied for an Ohio ID and later a Social Security card and driver’s license using the stolen identity. Misseldine presented a copy of the Bourgeois’ birth certificate and the names of the real Bourgeois’ parents, Jacques and Paula. In 2007, she posed with the stolen identity to obtain a student pilot certificate and the US passport. Missildine allegedly submitted paperwork claiming she needed the passport to travel internationally in her occupation as a flight attendant for JetSelect where she was employed under a false identity.
The real Brie Bourgeois died in 1997, states an affidavit filed in Ohio federal court by a special agent with the U.S. Diplomatic Security Service. According to public records, a “Brie Bourgeois” did attend Ohio State, as did an Ava Misseldine, who is listed as having studied liberal arts. Paula Bourgeois said she was never made aware that her daughter’s identity had been usurped and nor did she know Misseldine. “Brie died so young, she had no Social Security number,” Bourgeois said worried that she could somehow be held liable for any financial crimes committed in her child’s name. “She was only 4 1/2 months old when she passed away… I’m really flabbergasted.” Jacques Bourgeois died in 2003, she said.
Authorities allege that Misseldine gave Social Security staff a story about being “homeschooled her entire life with no job” but needing to obtain a Social Security number in order to attend college. A Social Security number was then issued. Over the course of nearly two decades, Misseldine allegedly went back and forth using her real name and assumed name on various official documents, the complaint alleges. She allegedly obtained two Ohio driver’s licenses, one with each name, three years apart. This, lawyers say was the start of her undoing. Although investigators would not connect the dots for nearly 20 years, this, the affidavit suggests, was Misseldine’s first mistake. Through it all, Misseldine even duped a federal judge overseeing a bankruptcy petition she filed in 2004, according to prosecutors.
In 2008, Misseldine registered a retail business in Ohio called “Brie Bourgeois” and transferred ownership of a vehicle from “Brie Bourgeois” to Ava Misseldine, the affidavit says. She was also sued by a creditor in civil court who referred to her as Ava Misseldine (aka Brie Bourgeois),” states the affidavit.
Later in October 2014, Misseldine appeared in court for a hearing on her application. When asked if she had ever used the name Brie Bourgeois, Misseldine “said she had only used that name for about two years, and she last used it about four years ago,” the affidavit states. “She claimed that she was adopted, ‘Brie Bourgeois’ was her birth name, and she briefly used the name ‘Brie Bourgeois’ until her adoptive family became upset about it. This was a lie: Brie Bourgeois was a real person who died as an infant, with a different date of birth and different birth parents than Ava Misseldine.”
How did Ava Misseldine's con get caught?
In 2021 she applied to have her passport replaced, according to the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Ohio and that's when an investigation was launched into her identity. She submitted a photograph of herself, listing Bourgeois’ birthdate as her own, and the Social Security number she obtained in 2003 in Bourgeois’ name. Among other things the probe revealed was the fact that she allegedly applied for and obtained 16 different Covid-19 pandemic-related business relief loans under the Paycheck Protection Program. The defendant further used a combination of real, defunct, and entirely fake businesses to obtain loans totaling in excess of $1.5 million.
“Her loan applications list her businesses as various bakeries and catering companies, including her former bakeries Sugar Inc. Cupcakes & Tea Salon in Dublin and Koko Tea Salon & Bakery in New Albany and at Easton,” federal authorities allege in a press release. “She submitted forged documents to support her loan applications. Misseldine used the pandemic relief loan money to purchase a home for $647,500 adjacent to Zion National Park in Utah and a home for $327,500 in Michigan.”
If convicted, she faces up to 30 years in prison. Misseldine does not yet have a lawyer listed in court records.