A federal jury in St. Paul returned a guilty verdict on October 7 against Sharmaine Meadows, 45, of Lake Elmo, Minnesota, finding that she ran a years-long scheme to extract over $3.6 million from a state Medicaid housing program while the homeless residents it was designed to serve received nothing at all.
The conviction carries meaning well beyond a single defendant. Meadows' operation was part of a broader pattern of fraud that collectively drove Minnesota's Housing Stabilization Services Program into complete collapse, after program costs climbed to 4,000 percent above initial government estimates — permanently eliminating a resource that thousands of vulnerable Minnesotans had depended on to secure stable housing.
