Easton found guilty of fraud in Yuba City church case

Mar. 5—Chanell Easton, the wife of former Marysville Police Chief Aaron Easton, was found guilty Monday in a federal court of two counts of aggravated identity theft stemming from her time at Yuba City church.

In May 2022, a grand jury returned an indictment that charged the 38-year-old Chanell Easton with 22 counts of wire fraud and two counts of aggravated identity theft. Easton, who now lives in Oklahoma, pleaded guilty to the fraud counts on Oct. 17, 2023, but pleaded not guilty to the remaining two counts, officials said.

Easton waived the opportunity for a jury trial. A one-day trial was instead held before U.S. District Judge John A. Mendez.

Federal officials said that according to court documents and evidence presented at the trial, Easton from 2013 to 2018 worked as the church administrator at a church in Yuba City.

"During her employment, Easton stole over $360,000 from the church, including from its food pantry and youth ministry, during a years-long embezzlement scheme," officials said Tuesday. "Easton used credit cards associated with the church to make personal purchases — at a hair salon, retail stores, online retailers, a vacation rental service, and to buy VIP concert tickets — and then paid off the resulting balance with the church's money."

During the trial it was revealed that one of the credit cards used by Easton belonged to the church's youth minister. Easton then used this person's identity to make thousands of dollars in unauthorized personal purchases on Zappos.com, officials said.

"Easton's use of the youth minister's identity allowed her to obscure her embezzlement and to shift suspicion away from herself, thereby allowing her fraudulent scheme to continue," officials said. "Easton also transferred money directly from the church's bank accounts to her own personal account, paid down the balance of her own personal credit card, and paid her cellphone provider for her personal bills and for new phones. Easton also stole money from the church by writing checks to others for personal expenses and by writing checks to herself, on which she forged the signatures of the church's treasurer or the head volunteer of the church's food pantry."

The case against Easton was the result of an investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Assistant U.S. Attorneys Elliot Wong and Lee Bickley prosecuted the case.

Easton is scheduled to be sentenced on June 25 in federal court. She faces a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison and a $250,000 fine for each count of wire fraud, and a mandatory two-year sentence on each count of aggravated identity theft.

A controversial chief

Aaron Easton, the former Marysville police chief who is married to Chanell Easton and is now a defense attorney in Oklahoma City, left his position with the police department in 2017 after becoming the subject of a sexual assault investigation.

The woman who alleged abuse by Easton told Yuba County sheriff's detectives that he forced her to perform oral copulation in his patrol vehicle during an academy-required ride-along.

According to reporting by The Sacramento Bee, "Easton would sometimes take his students on ride-alongs so they could see how law enforcement worked in the real world. Around 9 p.m. on Feb. 22, 2008, a female cadet stepped into his patrol car. The woman had already joined Easton on two other ride-alongs, both uneventful."

Years later, however, she remembered the incident in more detail.

"Sometime around midnight, Easton parked his patrol car in a rural area in Yuba County. There were no other cars around, she said. It was dark. Then, she said, Easton leaned over the gun rack and kissed her. She said she pushed herself as deeply into the passenger seat as she could to avoid him, but it was useless; she felt like she couldn't run, either, because it was the middle of the night in the middle of nowhere," The Bee reported. "'Let me teach you how to kiss,' she remembered him saying before he put his tongue in her mouth. She tried pushing and slapping his hands away as he groped her. Easton told her that he and his wife, Sara, were separated. Then, she said, he physically forced the student to give him oral sex."

In 2018, Yuba County District Attorney Patrick McGrath decided not to charge Easton with sexually assaulting the woman in 2008, the Appeal previously reported.

In a statement, McGrath said the assault was "more likely than not" to have occurred, but that prosecutors lacked enough admissible evidence to convince a criminal jury beyond a reasonable doubt.

"Based on a review of the totality of the admissible evidence, the allegation was determined to be credible and, more likely than not, to have occurred," McGrath said in 2018. "However, the unanimous opinion of the reviewing prosecutors was that the admissible evidence was insufficient for a criminal jury to unanimously agree, beyond a reasonable doubt, that Aaron Easton had committed the alleged crime."

Nearly three years prior to the former DA's decision, Easton's previous wife, Sara Easton, died of a gunshot wound on Aug. 16, 2015. Her death was reported as a suicide, but the circumstances surrounding that death and what happened afterwards has remained on the minds of skeptical Yuba-Sutter residents who lived in the area at the time.

"Aaron Easton called 911 at 3:46 a.m. His wife, he told the dispatcher, had shot herself. Officer Chad Cornwell was the first to arrive at the Eastons' home, tucked in a tree-lined subdivision of single-story houses in south Yuba City," The Bee reported. "When he pulled up in his Yuba City Police Department squad car, Easton was standing outside waiting for him. He was wearing basketball shorts and no shirt. He directed Cornwell to the bedroom where Sara was lying on the dingy beige carpet. Sara was still alive. She was on her back, next to the bed. On top of the nightstand was a Glock model 26 semi-automatic handgun — the model issued to law enforcement officers."

According to reports, Cornwell pulled Sara Easton onto her side which allowed him to see a gunshot wound on the left side of her head. After Easton was transported by ambulance for medical care, Cornwell asked Aaron Easton what happened.

"Easton told Cornwell that he was sitting on the couch in the living room in the middle of the night when he heard 'two distinct gunshots,'" The Bee reported. "The shots came in quick succession, Easton told him. When Easton went to the bedroom, he said he found Sara lying on her back on the bed. He told the officer that the first thing he did was take the gun from Sara's hand, unload it and put it on the nightstand. After that, he tried to give her CPR while she was on the bed. He moved her body to the floor. He called 911 for help and returned to CPR until he heard the officer arrive."

Former Sutter County Sheriff J. Paul Parker told The Bee that he never took Aaron Easton's story for granted.

"It just might be a suspicious old sheriff," Parker said. "We were suspicious immediately."

Investigators who searched the house after Sara Easton's death reported that they found the Glock 26 on the nightstand with its slide locked open so it wouldn't fire, The Bee reported. They also located a single fired shell casing on the bed, next to a bloodied pillow.

"On the other side of the bed, they found an unfired round, ostensibly from when Easton said he ejected the round in the chamber and cleared the gun," The Bee reported. "As far as they could tell, only one shot had been fired — not two, as Easton said he clearly heard from the living room."

A restoration company later cleaned the blood and disposed of the soiled sheets and pillows, leaving only low-resolution images of the crime scene that would be some of the only evidence that Sara Easton's family ever saw, The Bee reported.

According to reports, toxicology results showed that she had no illicit drugs in her system, only low doses of anti-anxiety and sleep medications. There also was no alcohol detected in her system.

Dr. Kelly Arthur-Kenny, a forensic pathologist with whom Sutter County contracted for autopsies, wrote that the gunshot wound was on the left side of Sara Easton's head near her temple. A single bullet, no exit wound, The Bee reported.

"On Sara's temple, Arthur-Kenny observed 'stippling' — spotted burn marks from the gunpowder that blasts from the barrel of a gun," The Bee reported. "There was also no soot on her skin, in her hair or in the wound; there was no soot on the bandages wrapped around her head, either. If she'd died from the shot immediately and the scene had been untouched when investigators arrived, that would have been a telling piece of evidence. A lack of soot would have meant that the gun had been fairly far away from her head when the trigger was pulled."

According to reporting by The Bee, Aaron Easton and another police officer touched Sara Easton's body before paramedics arrived at her home in Yuba City.

"Arthur-Kenny determined that 'the range of fire (was) intermediate' — the gun was at least an inch from her head when it went off, but according to her report, it also could have been several feet away," The Bee reported. "Sara was shot in the left side of the head; detectives confirmed with her family that she was right-handed. Sara's hands were tested for gunshot residue, but the results are left out of the autopsy report."

While Aaron Easton was suspected by some of being responsible for his wife's death, "the autopsy revealed evidence that was suggestive, but nothing in the pathologist's report, not even the shot in the left side of the head, could totally rule out suicide," The Bee reported.

"This inconclusive autopsy happened in a very particular context: The bedroom where the shooting occurred was a contaminated scene. Her husband, then-Marysville Police Chief Aaron Easton, moved the gun to the nightstand and his wife to the floor," The Bee reported. "Healthcare workers may have inadvertently wiped away gunshot residue or bloodstain patterns that could have shown where the gun was when it went off. Those pieces of physical evidence could have more conclusively told the story of what happened in that bedroom."