Woman expected to plead in crowdsourcing case
A Cecil woman expects to plead guilty to charges stemming from allegations she established a page on a crowdsourcing website, allegedly under a false pretense of raising money for a Cecil teenager with terminal cancer.
Brittani McDonald, 26, said she doesn’t plan to fight the charges against her but maintains she created the page to help Luke Blanock and his family.
“The account was not intended for me to take any money from them,” McDonald said. “It was all to be donated to them.”
She’s reached a tentative plea deal with authorities in which she would plead guilty to criminal attempt at theft by deception and criminal attempt at theft by failure to make required disposition of funds. For pleading guilty to those charges, McDonald will receive 18 months of probation and 50 hours of community service.
Washington County Assistant District Attorney Rachel Wheeler said money raised through the page in question was returned to donors.
McDonald waived her right to a preliminary hearing Thursday at the district court in Cecil.
McDonald said she offered to give the family access to the account and the funds in question.
She took the page down before Cecil police filed charges against her March 7.
“I just figured if he was that sick, it would help a little bit,” she said.
The investigation began when Luke’s father, Kurt Blanock, alerted police to the page. He said neither he nor Luke authorized the page, and the family hadn’t received any of the $1,000 raised there.
The page also misspelled the family’s last name and used the hashtag #StayStrongLuke, instead of #LukeStrong, which was used in other efforts to raise funds for the Canon-McMillan student-athlete’s cancer battle.
Before he alerted police, Kurt Blanock received an email from an address linked to the account, in which the writer chalked the issue up to a misunderstanding, according to police.
The page’s creator was listed as “Eric P.”
Police said they traced it to McDonald through an account on the money-transfer app WePay associated with the crowdsourcing account.
McDonald said she was using someone else’s pre-existing account with their permission.