Fergie's Tech Blog

Background checks haunt past offenders, and ID theft victims

An AP newswire article, via MSNBC, reports that:

Christine O’Neill had been working in the cafeteria of the King Philip Middle School in Norfolk for about three weeks when she was called to the superintendent’s office. She was told her criminal background check had come back, and she was fired.

O’Neill left the building, sat in her car, and wept. Not because her past had come back to haunt her, but because someone else’s had.

O’Neill, 48, of Medway, didn’t have a criminal record, but her identity was intertwined with that of a petty criminal who had stolen O’Neill’s license in the 1980s. When the woman was arrested, she gave the license to police, making O’Neill one of her aliases.

posted by Fergie @ 8/15/2005 07:19:00 AM