South Orange County's Tesoro High School encourages its students to be “independent learners,” and so you could argue that Omar Shahid Khan's scholarship exceeded all his classmates.
In 2008, Khan and another student slyly used computer spyware equipment against a school official to steal advanced-placement (AP) tests from classrooms, alter test scores and change official college-transcript grades.
Somewhere, John Belushi is smiling, but prosecutors weren't entertained or amused.
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Today, thanks to the DA's “White Collar Crime” unit, Khan pleaded guilty to three felony charges, including commercial burglary and altering public records.
The DA's office said in a press release that Khan, now 21, will be sentenced on Aug. 26; his punishment “is expected to be” 30 days in jail, three years of probation, 500 hours of community service and $14,900 in restitution.
Khan's co-defendant, Tanvir Singh, also now 21, pleaded guilty in 2008 and received a punishment of 200 hours of community service and three years of formal probation.
An Orange County Sheriff's Department investigation revealed that Khan had spent his senior year at the high school placing spyware devices on the computers of several teachers and school administrators.
CNN-featured investigative reporter R. Scott Moxley has won Journalist of the Year honors at the Los Angeles Press Club; been named Distinguished Journalist of the Year by the LA Society of Professional Journalists; obtained one of the last exclusive prison interviews with Charles Manson disciple Susan Atkins; won inclusion in Jeffrey Toobin’s The Best American Crime Reporting for his coverage of a white supremacist’s senseless murder of a beloved Vietnamese refugee; launched multi-year probes that resulted in the FBI arrests and convictions of the top three ranking members of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department; and gained praise from New York Times Magazine writers for his “herculean job” exposing entrenched Southern California law enforcement corruption.