After a nearly year-long investigation, a Maypearl woman has been arrested for embezzling funds from a youth cheer group to pay for her lifestyle.
Maypearl police said that Ashley Nicole Boston embezzled nearly $20,000 from the Maypearl Youth Cheer Association between 2020 and 2023. She allegedly used the funds for personal purchases at grocery stores, liquor stores, and nail salons, making direct deposits to her Venmo account.
Dozens of elementary school-aged children participated in the group, which was associated with youth football games played at the local high school field in the small community about 40 miles southwest of Dallas. The association is funded by parents and local businesses in the town, which numbers less than 1,000 residents.
Boston, who formerly ran the cheer association, handled all the financial aspects of the organization without any system of checks and balances, according to Kayla Williams, the current president of Maypearl Cheer Association.
“She handled all of the ordering, all of the money, all of the fundraising. She did everything on her own,” Williams said, per Fox 4 KDFW.
Boston’s alleged misuse of funds first came to light last year when Williams and the other moms in the group discovered that the kids’ equipment had not been ordered because there were no funds in the association’s account. The group of women demanded that Boston hand over the accounts to them.
“So we all sat down and spent countless hours trying to make sense of things,” Williams said, per Fox 4.
They discovered that $19,417 of the association’s money had been misappropriated. Following the internal audit, the information was turned over to the Maypearl Police Department, which continued the investigation and ultimately issued a felony theft arrest warrant for Boston on June 27.
Boston turned herself in, and the case is awaiting review by the Ellis County District Attorney’s Office.
The Maypearl Cheer Association has changed its policies and is now run by a nine-person board.
In Dallas, 91 embezzlement cases and more than 16,000 theft/larceny offenses have been reported this year, according to the City of Dallas crime analytics dashboard.
These are just some of the crimes the Dallas Police Department must spend its limited resources and manpower to investigate. DPD is currently short about 1,000 officers, according to a prior City analysis, and is working with a budget that is far smaller than that of other high-crime municipalities, such as Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York.