A parole agent who was working for the state when he obtained bus passes and Target gift cards under false pretenses and traded them for painkillers prescribed to a parolee pleaded guilty Monday to criminal charges.
Scott Patric Keblis accepted a plea deal from Orange County Superior Court Judge Robert Fitzgerald, who immediately sentenced him to 90 days in the Orange County Jail and three years of formal probation on his plea to one felony count of embezzlement by a public employee and one misdemeanor count of possession of a controlled substance.
Keblis, who was employed at the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation at the time of the crime, may also apply for home confinement or pay out of pocket to stay in a city jail instead of the county jail.
Keblis, 50, of Chino, must also make restitution and is barred from ever holding any “office of honor, trust or profit” in California, according to the Orange County District Attorney’s Office.
Keblis obtained two bus passes and two $40 Target gift cards from the CDCR on Nov. 23, 2015, claiming that he needed them for a parolee under his supervision, according to prosecutors.
Later that day, he drove in his state vehicle to Huntington Beach to meet with a different parolee, who was not under his supervision, and exchanged the bus passes and gift cards — plus $30 of his own money — for 26 of the parolee’s prescription hydrocodone pills.
An anonymous tip that he was trading bus passes and gift cards for drugs led to his arrest last July by the CDCR’s Internal Affairs division.
–City News Service