A teenager who was arrested on suspicion of ‘hacking’ her high school’s election system in order to have herself crowned homecoming queen says she is going to sue her school and police department.
Emily Grover, 18, was apprehended in March 2021 along with her mother, a school vice principal, for allegedly hacking into private student records in order to cast hundreds of fake votes.
The Pensacola, Florida high school homecoming queen did not contest the charges and completed a supervised program, the completion of which saw them dropped.
But after losing her place at university over the incident, the teen has now said she is going to sue the Florida Department of Law Enforcement and her public school system for false arrest and violating her civil rights.
Emily had a full scholarship to the University of Western Florida but the offer was taken back by the university after the ‘homecoming heist’ scandal broke last year.
Her mum, Laura Carroll, 50, was also arrested and subsequently lost her job as an elementary school vice principal.
At the time Carroll had access to student’s records across the whole school board area, including the highschool attended by her daughter.
The system contains information about students' grades, medical histories, test scores, attendance, disciplinary actions, personnel information, emergency contacts, schedules, and student ID numbers. It was linked to an application called Election runner, with which students could cast their votes for homecoming queen.
School pals of Emily told reporters at the time that she had long bragged of being able to access records and see their grades.
'I have known that Emily Grover logs into her mom's school account in order to access grades and test scores since freshman year,' one student said in a statement to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.
'She looks up all of our group of friends' grades and makes comments about how she can find our test scores all of the time.'
Another said, 'She did not seem like logging in was a big deal and was very comfortable doing so.'
Florida Department of Law Enforcement agents discovered evidence of unauthorised access to student information via Carroll's administrator account. Ultimately, investigators discovered that Carroll had accessed 372 high school records since 2019, 339 of which were Tate students.
Emily Grover and her mother Laura Carroll were charged last March with felony hacking and fraud.
But now Marie Mattox, an attorney for Grover, says her client is innocent of any criminal wrongdoing and she wants to make a clean start.
Mattox added that Emily’s completion of the supervised program does and did not indicate her guilt, adding the teen girl's life was bulldozed by the accusations and she is now looking to put the episode behind her.
Grover has filed a Notice of intent in Escambia County, Florida to reclaim her name and prove her innocence, she says she plans to file suit against the Florida Department of Law Enforcement and her public school system.
'She needs to be able to start her life over without this wreckage of the past and be able to live a normal life that she intended to live.' Mattox told Wear-TV.
'This is a black cloud that is travelling with Emily everywhere she goes,' says her attorney Marie Mattox, who added that if a 'thorough' investigation had been conducted, the conclusion would have been that Grover 'didn't engage in any criminal activity' and 'was not involved at all in casting any votes.'
In an interview with Good Morning America last year, Grover said that even when the school removed the hundreds of votes it labelled as having been fraudulently cast, she was still the homecoming queen candidate who garnered the most votes.
