A Brooklyn social worker who ghosted at-risk special needs children — ditching vital therapy sessions as part of a $177,000 Medicaid scam — will spend the next three and a half years behind bars.
Enock Mensah was supposed to be providing government-funded early intervention services to New York City families with developmentally disabled and autistic kids, services that dry up once a child turns 3 years old.
As that clock ticked away, Mensah didn’t provide the services several families needed, instead forging more than 1,000 session notes so he could submit payment claim forms to health care agencies, federal prosecutors in Brooklyn said.
Mensah, 62, now of Franklin Park, N.J., was convicted in a Brooklyn Federal Court trial in 2019 of health care fraud and theft of federal funds. He was sentenced on Thursday by Judge Ann Donnelly.
Mensah scammed the system from 2013 to 2018, abusing an “honor system” to bill Medicaid and the city Health Department $177,000 for sessions he never attended.
In several instances, he was hanging out with friends or reading the newspaper at a gas station at times when he claimed he was giving therapy sessions, prosecutors said.
One parent testified that she was in the Dominican Republic with her autistic child when Mensah billed for two therapy sessions that never happened. In some cases, he forged parents’ signatures on claims forms while in others, he persuaded them to sign blank forms, officials said.
In a 2021 sentencing memo, prosecutors took issue with Mensah’s testimony on the stand, noting that he disparaged the neighborhoods he would visit as “danger zones” and “leveled personal attacks” against some of the parents he served.
”You have drug dealings all around, the homes are filthy sometimes. Sometimes they are roach-infested, mouse-infested,” he said.
Mensah described one mother as a “voodoo” practitioner and said, “She was having a problem with the child’s father. The child’s father was probably incarcerated.”
As part of his 42-month sentence, Mensah is required to pay $177,00 in restitution.
“Mensah shamefully enriched himself at the expense of the children who the Early Intervention Program is meant to benefit,” U.S. Attorney Breon Peace said Thursday. “With today’s sentence, the defendant paid the price for abusing the trust placed in him as a social worker for vulnerable families.”