I worked with a guy that had falsified some records to hide some misdeeds in his younger years. He made it 19 years before something unrelated forced us to do thorough background checks on our employees. He was escorted off the premises by police and his benefits voided by HR.
All I’m saying is… at some point you got away with it. We did him dirty.
I know there are plenty of hyper puritanical people who would disagree with me, but I feel like people really embody the ship of theseus paradox. We're just not the same person we were decades ago. I really don't care if you were running around dealing drugs, robbing banks, stealing cars or whatever two decades ago. If I found out one of my coworkers was a career bank robber I'd just want to get a beer and hear the crazy stories.
I was just recently given 24 hours to pack whatever I could carry and leave my home after the landlord's daughter found out my real government name which I rarely use and found a newspaper article about where I was arrested on false charges 11 years ago. (I spent 10 years in jail awaiting trial and then the charges were dropped) Most of the newspapers completely removed all mentions of the case, bless them, but it's the Internet -- removing something from the Internet is like trying to take the pee out of a swimming pool.
After asking how I was going to manage on the streets, homeless (it was -30*C at the time), he did come to his senses somewhat and get me a couple of week's grace which let me find somewhere else to stay.
It says in this document that you (Bocock, Charles) were charged with "CHILD PORN/POSS PHOTO/VIC <13":
https://www.cookcountysheriff.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02...
And this article also states that you were charged with soliciting a girl for sex and possessing child pornography:
https://www.shawlocal.com/2019/09/04/inmate-sues-because-he-...
"Bocock was arrested and jailed June 10, 2013, after he went to a Dunkin’ Donuts in Plainfield to meet with a 12-year-old girl for sex, according to court records."
And this article too:
https://patch.com/illinois/plainfield/brit-charged-child-sex...
"In exchange for the money, Bocock wanted a girl for sex, officials said, and preferred one between the ages of 7 and 11. [...] After Bocock was taken into custody, police searched his North Tripp Avenue home and found 'numerous' images of child pornography, a prosecutor said at a prior court hearing."
Also this one:
https://web.archive.org/web/20141106115016/http://patch.com/...
"Bocock allegedly responded to a Craigslist advertisement posted by a Plainfield resident trying to get money for his car payment. But in exchange for the money, Bocock wanted a girl for sex, officials said.
"The Plainfield resident went to the police and an investigator pretending to be the cash-strapped Craigslist poster continued the online conversation with Bocock, officials said. The investigator reportedly offered Bocock his 12-year-old niece for the car payment money, and a rendezvous was set up for Monday afternoon at a Dunkin' Donuts on Route 59."
And that you are currently on the Illinois child sex offender registry for this:
https://isp.illinois.gov/Sor/Details/X23A0424
What do you have to say about that?
I was going to answer your original question, but you edited it to now say this.
If the charges were dropped; does it really matter what they have to say?
As to your original question: I had a friend get arrested for picking up their wife's (narcotic) medications the day after she died. He didn't do it with any malicious intent, just habit. The cop didn't care.
It took 4 years to get his day in court and the charges were dropped.
There are many reasons to do things, that a cop will happily make look like whatever they want in order to get an arrest.
Obviously you don't owe anyone here an explanation. But you're the one who seem to want us to believe that you were innocent enough that throwing you out of the flat was completely unjust persecution; if that's what you want, then it's reasonable to expect you to account for how such a charge came to be filed against you.
Criminal prosecution is (rightfully) hard; from a Baysean probability perspective, given no other evidence than what has been presented in this thread so far, which is more likely -- that the charges were dropped because they were a complete fantasy from the beginning, or because there were legal technicalities that would have made a conviction difficult?
(That said, maybe I'm just naive, but I'd give "Man genuinely asks a random stranger on Craigslist to help you arrange sex with a minor" a fairly low Baysean "prior"... I'd definitely be looking for evidence of a set-up if I were the police.)
Maybe you should check who you are replying to. I was originally answering your question about how things could take that long. I have no idea about OP, but I also provided an example of how cops will misconstrue things to simply get an arrest. In my own personal life, my parents had a cop search my car because they thought I was dealing drugs. The cop found a small ripped piece of paper (from who knows what), and claimed it was from rolling papers. So, I trust a cop saying "this is why X" about as far as you can throw toilet paper up their tree.
In my experience, there is a far greater probability that they are completely fabricated nonsense.
Looks like we both need to look at who we're replying to more closely -- this is my first post in the thread. ;-)
Right, so in this case, the question of "How would you account for the fact that police claimed a bit of paper was rolling paper for marijuana" is answered in part by the first sentence: The cop went in believing that drugs were almost certainly present (because a child's own parents reported them), and so was going to find something no matter what.
"How would you account for the fact that it this police detective claims to have had a conversation in which John Doe agreed to meet at place X to pay for sex with a 12-year-old" is less easy to construct.
lol
Perhaps could be reworded:
The cop went in believing that a pedophile were almost certainly present (because a child's parents reported them), and so was going to find something no matter what.
For all we know, the parents were abusing the child and the child wanted to tell someone they trusted. The parent(s) found out and made some shit up.
I don't know man. People do some weird shit. I once climbed up the side of an apartment building to beat my friends taking the stairs, just to surprise them. I'm sure an onlooker might think I was going to rob someone.
It's like that old bias thing:
A man takes an old lady's purse, is he a criminal?
I left out a crucial detail, the old lady handed her son the purse.
The articles I linked above state that it was a sting operation. The perpetrator thought he was paying $500 to the uncle of a 12-year-old girl (who was apparently still slightly too old for his liking) so that he could rape her, but really this was a scenario set up by the police to gather evidence, with the goal of preventing future harm to an actual child.
The guy who was actually there says they are false. Meh. I’d rather believe people than obviously corrupt/biased systems.
https://casetext.com/case/people-v-bocock
"When one looks at the evidence in this case, no reasonable person could conclude that the defendant did not send e-mails, text messages, and have the phone conversations regarding having sex with a 12-year-old girl."
Sigh. After going on and on about how the state failed to actually prove the submitted evidence is actually true (merely circumstantial), but they aren’t allowed to do anything about it until a trial actually happens. Surprisingly, it looks like the trial never happened. Seems a little suspicious, does it not?
Seems like this judgement is discussing a procedural error from the prosecution, not that he didn't try to meet a 12-year-old girl in the back of her uncle's van to rape her.
But who knows, maybe he'll return to the thread and explain what he thought he was doing when arrested in that police sting and what all those emails, texts and phone calls he exchanged with undercover investigators were about, if not that.
Where the “procedural error” was literally proving the evidence is true. If the evidence isn’t true, then it’s pretty clear his only crime might simply be being profiled and arrested. We don’t know, and probably never will. Jumping to the assumption that he’s guilty from unverified evidence seems wrong to me. On a pretty fundamental level.
The procedural error was that the prosecution neglected to have someone testify that the evidence submitted of the emails, texts and phone calls was a true representation of the actual emails, texts and phone calls originally made.
That's a mistake for the prosecution to contend with in correctly making their case before the court, but it doesn't stop everyone else from casting their own judgement.
I can't think of any other plausible explanation of why he was arrested with $500 in his hand at a specific place that had been prearranged over email, phone calls and texts, other than to commit the rape of a 12-year-old girl, for that price, that had been discussed with the undercover officers - can you?
We don’t actually know if he did any of that. There was never a trial. For all we know, they were looking for their guy and he never showed. Then this posh British guy came in to get some coffee and they started chatting him up. Him, not knowing what is going on, decides “what the hell, I’ll play along with the prank” (note, he never said, in person, he was going to have sex with her). Turns out it wasn’t a prank at all, but they thought they found their guy and bam, he goes to jail.
I’d be curious to hear the Duncan Donuts recording. I think that would be the deciding factor for me.
That sounds quite the unlikely tale. How would you explain the child pornography they found at his home, was that a prank too?
Read above about how a cop planted evidence in my car to get what he wanted. Google Civil Forfeiture if you want to see more scummy ways cops will fuck up your life for giggles.
For all we know it was anime and the cop said it was child porn because he had never seen anime in his life.
Your alternative explanations all sound very unlikely in aggregate. If the material found by the police was anime drawings of children being raped, that's also vile and disgusting, and not a great defence in the court of public opinion.
Just as unlikely as…
Appellate court: decisions look legit based on evidence; at trial, please prove evidence
Plaintive: how about we just don’t have a trial…
Defendant: ffs
Something smells fishy. Maybe I’m wrong, but I’ve been on the wrong side of cops’ biases too many times to think they are automatically in the right; making virtually any other possibility just as likely. For example, for all we know, the defendant is actually an alien and they simply wanted to run experiments on him for a few years. Oh, wait, he actually is an alien. lol.
Anyway, I got nothing and doxing them on here without any actual evidence of wrongdoing, but insisting that circumstantial evidence is proof without even a trial is super fucked up.
I’m not a lawyer but I’ve worked with plenty of them to prove some technical shit or another for a case, even the FBI. So I’ve seen some crazy and unlikely cases in my life. This sounds suspiciously like they couldn’t pass the bar of “without a doubt” and simply gave up.
Oh, and why is a trial important? So we get to hear his side of the story. You’ve only heard one side, and he would be wise (and well within his rights) to never share his side.
His side of the story is that the cruel landlord and daughter went to immediately kick him out of the house after finding out about some "false charges" from a decade ago. He's trying to evoke sympathy by providing very limited information as to why the landlord made that call. I see nothing wrong with providing some actual relevant context for the other side, and asking him what he has to say about that.
Would you want this guy living in your house, in close proximity to your children, after finding out these charges and the circumstances of his arrest?
Maybe he had an ex that wanted to make life hell for him. Create a new e-mail account using the guys name, use that to create a Craigslist account, do the whole bit. Come back "to pick something up", plant some child porn on his computer; or maybe the "child porn" on the computer wasn't really that childish (either just normal porn, or maybe porn alleging to be 17-year-olds or something). Arrange with the "uncle" (whom you know are the cops) to meet at a place you know he frequents regularly: maybe he just carries $500 with him as a habit; maybe he always stops at the Dunkin Donuts after visiting the payday check casher -- an ex would know that kind of thing. Or maybe come up with some other excuse to get him there with the requisite cash. Or, play then Craigslist game the other way, and arrange for him to be there with the cash -- maybe he thought he was buying a used car, or maybe he actually thought he was buying a used instrument from Craigslist, being sold by a 12-year-old girl!
There absolutely are vindictive people like that in the world; and my guess is there are a lot more vindictive people like that than complete idiots who would ask a complete stranger on Craigslist, out of the blue, to arrange sex with someone under 11. (And then come on Hacker News decades years later to protest his innocence?) "I was framed" certainly seems implausible, but slightly less implausible than the accusation.
The issue here is that qingcharles is lying.
He is a creepy pedo who tried to meetup with a 12 year old to have sex and is a registered sex offender.
"Bocock allegedly responded to a Craigslist advertisement posted by a Plainfield resident trying to get money for his car payment. But in exchange for the money, Bocock wanted a girl for sex, officials said.
The Plainfield resident went to the police and an investigator pretending to be the cash-strapped Craigslist poster continued the online conversation with Bocock, officials said. The investigator reportedly offered Bocock his 12-year-old niece for the car payment money, and a rendezvous was set up for Monday afternoon at a Dunkin' Donuts on Route 59.
After Bocock was taken into custody, police searched his North Tripp Avenue home and found "numerous" images of child pornography, Casson said."
Yes exactly this. If they were false charges as he claims, then he wouldn't be listed on the sex offender registry. His story just doesn't add up.
I don’t know. I tend to believe people are innocent unless proven guilty. “Allegedly” kinda stands out here…
Anyway, I can’t believe I’m arguing over basic human rights ingrained in the constitution. Well, I guess all rights go out the window “for the children” so I’m not surprised. Just disgusted.
How is that even possible? What kind of system allows such a nonsense to occur?
As long as you waive your right to a speedy trial and you don't post bail you can be held without trial basically forever in the United States.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalief_Browder
rikers island, nyc
You got popped for being a creepy pedo tho.
makes sense why you hide your real name and them kicking you out is totally justified.
If you are in the United States, in most jurisdictions, a 24 our eviction would be against the law and come with significant penalties for the landlord.
10 years in jail awaiting charges certainly means you waved off a speedy trial. Yet still, I believe you are leaving out a significant detail or two.
What if they raped children or murdered people? How far does it go?
I can forgive but it also is wise to keep distance relative to the severity of the aberration.
At some point we should either give them life imprisonment or accept that if they are free to go then they paid their debt and need to be reintegrated (obviously if they did sex offences against minors then don’t put them in jobs with high contact to minors).
No death penalty if nitrogen hypoxia were the method?
I’m against death penalty because:
1. False conviction rate is unacceptably high
2. It’s financially similarly burdensome to do life imprisonment as death penalty
3. Presence of death penalty doesn’t seem to impact homicide rates
I am all for putting some people in prison and never letting them out (because of high chance of recidivism).
These are bad reasons to be against the death penalty. Even if the state were always perfectly correct, the right to life is the most basic of human rights and the state should not deprive anyone, including criminals, of human rights.
Jail already deprives people of human rights. I'm still against the death penalty though.
Is there any standard of evidence that could merit the death penalty?
Should people be able to choose it over a life sentence?
IMHO nitrogen would significantly bring that cost down
If lasting penalties are right for sex offenses against minors, why are they wrong for everything else?
I'm deliberately keeping those examples out of my statement because those are touchier. Murdered people? That depends on circumstance. Wantonly raping children, nah, but if it's a "peeing in a bush at night 1000yds from school" type conviction I don't care.
That depends on what the job is, isn’t it? If it would give them more access to children that would be cause for concern.
Same way about bank robbery. Previous bank robbery would give me a much bigger pause if we work on bank security or adjecent fields for example.
Why would that be a cause for concern?
I think they mean the likelihood of a person committing a crime for a second time is higher when they have already committed it once.
They might pee in a bush again?
As they say, it takes a thief to catch a thief. Who would be able to protect the bank better than a former bank robber?
It's weird for me, because there was a time when my only friends were murderers. To say that murderers are some of the nicest people I've ever met, on the whole, is a rather bizarre statement.
If I was locked up again and had the choice who to hang with, it would be murderers all the way.
I'm still in contact with many of them on a day-to-day basis.
It's the age old debate: Do people change?
I think that most people do not.
Teenagers get calmer when they get older, so I can accept ignoring minor misdeeds that can be attributed to not thinking, but not anything more serious.
You seem to think that people do change, and maybe some do, but I think that's a rarity. Anyway that's the crux of your message: Do people change or not?
19 years of uneventful employment later and we’re questioning, “do people change?” In his case, obviously yes. And his stuff was nonviolent, already long restituted crime. He fudged his background on a job application. The whole situation has never sat right with me.
Well, he also lied to police, substantiated with lie with false documents, and this resulted in someone ending up forcibly medicated and imprisoned for an extended time.
He knew the guy was going to trial and his comfortable life was more valuable to him than honesty or this other man's existence.
There should never be anything wrong with lying to the police... They're allowed to lie to you.
In the article's situation it was causing ongoing harm to another person so this is still pretty bad though
I'm with you on lying to the police.
But note that, according to the article, lying to the police was viewed as a minor crime. The major one was giving his bank a false name. The bank isn't even, notionally, an arm of the state.
I always found it so weird that in some legal systems defendant can't lie or interrogation is not very strict process where only final statement is signed...
Different guy...
Ah, it was unclear to me whether we'd reverted to talk about the article, but the duplication of 19 years answers that.
In any case, I guess-- it's complicated. We have this guy who was seemingly a different person for nearly 35 years, but then reverted to do something terrible (and similar to things he had done in the past) when it all threatened to come crashing down. And the other guy who was someone different for 19 years.
People do not change. In my opinion, people are driven by circumstance. Middle-class is relatively calm and peaceful because that's their circumstance. Of course, if you are part of one you'd claim otherwise in some process of self-insulation and protection.
Remove all entitlements, money and credentials from a middle-class person and throw them on the street and see how quickly that goes down.
You contradicted yourself here.
They are saying that people act (yield output) in function of their input (circumstances), but that this function itself doesn’t change: The same input will always yield the same output, for a given person.
(I’m not agreeing, just pointing out that there is no contradiction.)
Yes. If you define people as a mathematical function that works. Good point.
For 19 years he continuously committed a crime against another guy and when given the chance to have the other chap incarcerated he proceeded with it. You guys are all very kind with other people's lives, but if Google cancels one app you use it's suddenly thunder and brimstone and how you will never use Google again what a horrific thing. Give me a break. I can almost guarantee that, should I look in your profile history, you'll be holding some position about someone or some organization long after they acted in some manner you found unacceptable.
I'm all for forgiving people, but the guy was actively committing the crime against the other chap!
It's not the stolen identity that's the issue - it's the real person who actually has that identity.
If he had stolen an identity from someone dead we'd probably all just kinda shrug.
Absolutely agreed, but I'd go further and say you shouldn't have to hang onto everything you've ever done and get a few chances to reset in non-criminal situations too. I handled some previous relationships like shit in my early twenties, and upon years of reflection have formed what I'd consider a completely different sense of who I am and how I treat people; me at 23 is not me at 32, but it scares me a bit that my apparent integrity would be called into question should I have to dig into it, despite authentically having no part of me that could see life from those eyes again
I don't think these things are at odds, if I understand you correctly.
To use religious terminology - repentance makes up for the sin. In other words, the explicit reflection on your past and determination to do better is indeed a transformational thing.
The thing is, "repentance" is not a given and I would say that most people do not go through the introspection and evolution process, so there's no reason to assume that mere passage of time has transformed one into a different person than he who has transgressed.
In your case, the thing that would make me not worry about your "apparent integrity being called into question" is the fact that you yourself are calling yourself out for having done badly. That would be quite different than someone who's done the equivalent amount of aging but didn't recognize and evolve from their past.
Of course there are some things where mere recognition is not sufficient. For example where the misdeed can be correct or otherwise accounted for, they ought to be. EG if one has the opportunity to go back and undo/apologize/repay/whatever but they don't, then their repentance is itself in question (if you don't go back to fix the thing, are you really beating yourself up for having done it, etc?) At most extreme cases, it can mean confessing to a crime and throwing yourself at the mercy of the court or whatever.
Unfortunately it can be hard or impossible to differentiate between the two, but people are sorry for what they did for one of two reasons:
- They have empathy for the person they harmed and recognise that they should change their actions to avoid doing such harm again.
- After being caught, they regret how their own freedoms are now jeopardised by their past actions. So they regret their actions, but mostly (or only) because of how it affects them (now) and not how other people may have been harmed.
The problem with latter is that they are sometimes irredeemable, they may pay back their victims, but they see it kind of like losing a bet, they got caught this time so need to pay up and the lesson they internally learn is to not get caught.
I get where you're going, but I think it depends a lot to me on what somebody did. If it's all water under the bridge, fine. But if the people are still recovering from the harm, I have more questions. If they haven't apologized or made amends, same deal.
And I think it's always reasonable to keep an eye out for the extent to which patterns are still repeating. Some of us become better people over time, and some of us just get better at covering up.
Would you want to hear the crazy stories of a two decades ago child murderer too?
I didn't think so.
It's not as farfetched as you seem to believe.
I've been reading a translation of Water Margin; here's a bit from the story of Wu Song:
Actually, first, here's Wu Song's dictionary entry in the Hanyu Da Cidian:
[A character in Water Margin. Brave, fierce, strong, and violent, he once beat a man-eating tiger to death with his bare hands in Jingyang Pass. Afterward he joined the peasant uprising in Liangshan, with brutal killing [and rape?] everywhere, he is one of the heroic figures that the common people love.]
OK, now, the excerpt from Water Margin:
------
[Wu Song has been framed for theft by a conspiracy of three men, beaten, and exiled. He has just returned to the home of the highest-ranking conspirator (General Zhang), beheaded all three of them at the self-congratulatory party they were holding, and left a note claiming responsibility in blood on the wall.]
From all this killing the pavilion was swimming in blood, bodies could be seen lying everywhere in the flickering light of the candles. Wu Song said to himself: "It had to be all or nothing; kill a hundred, you can only die for it once." Sword at the ready, he went downstairs.
"What's all the hullabaloo upstairs?" the General's wife was inquiring as Wu Song rushed in. At this monstrous sight she shrieked: "Who are you?"
But Wu Song's sword was already flying. It caught her square in the forehead and she fell with a shriek right there in front of the pavilion. Wu Song held her down but when he tried to cut off her head the sword wouldn't cut. Baffled, he saw by the light of the moon that the blade was completely blunted. "So that's why I couldn't get her head off," he thought.
He slipped out of the back door to get his halberd again and threw away the blunt sword. Then he turned and went back to the tower. A lamp could be seen approaching. It turned out to be the singing girl, Yulan, the one he'd had the trouble with before. She was accompanied by two children. When the light of her lamp fell on the General's wife where she lay dead on the floor, Yulan screamed: "Merciful Heaven!"
Wu Song raised his halberd and ran her through the heart. He also killed the children, a single thrust to each. He went to the central hall, bolted the main door, and returned. He found two or three more young girls and stabbed them to death too. "Now at last," he said, "my heart is eased. Now it's time to stop."
------
This is the heroic figure that the common people love. The story is not short on villains, but Wu Song is not one of them.
Wu Song befriends a husband and wife who operate a series of inns, where they drug and butcher travelers who make the wrong impression in order to serve their meat to the other guests. They aren't villains either.
Legally, the statute of limitations addresses this very problem. You aren’t going to be dragged off to jail in your forties for some shoplifting you did in your twenties.
Socially, we probably should adopt something similar. Depending on the crime (non-violent, low cost to society, one time), we should all pretty much pretend it didn’t happen after about 5 - 10 years.
Statue of limitations is only on being charged. The conviction record is what causes problems and that sticks around for life in the US.
On the one hand, sure. When I started reading this new story, I was like, "If the guy has lived that long under a name, it's kinda his name now, right?"
But then I read how thoroughly he fucked over the guy whose name he stole in 2019, or 30 years after he started using the name. So some people may not be the same 20 years later. But some of them sure the hell are.
I dunno, I guess maybe we'd just disagree on where the line is drawn. Murder? Rape? Something of that caliber? Nah, I'm not just gonna assume or trust that the person has changed, even if it'd been 20 years or whatever.
Bank robbery? Well, I dunno. Armed robbery? Did anyone get hurt? Maybe that's not ok, no matter how much time has passed.
But yeah... drugs, whatever. Super petty crimes where there wasn't any violence or physical threats involved? Yeah, maybe no big deal if enough time has passed with the person leaving that kind of life behind.
But even then, it's hard to say. In this article, it seems like the faker didn't do anything that bad before stealing this other guy's identity. Like, the kind of stuff where, 20 years later, we'd probably just shrug and be like "yeah that guy's got some stories". But he ruined another man's life, causing a situation that led him to become committed to a mental hospital merely for claiming that someone else had stolen his identity. (Sure, the judge in the case almost certainly acted improperly, but that's not really the point.) I don't think that's something you just sweep under the rug, even in another 20 years.
Absolutes do not work and details matter. Maybe you just do not find the crimes you mentioned particularly disturbing. Now imagine that the coworker has comitted some crime that you personally are terrified of or disgusted by. Would you still just go get a beer and hang out? Would you trust the person around people you love or care about? Would you trust the person around potentially vulnerable people at your workplace?
I am glad you are trying to put skin in the game. But your examples are all non-sentimental. Let's pick a different one. If that guy used to touch children in public swimming pools (not rape) decades ago, would you let him babysit your child? Or what if that guy just used to flash himself to children?
I agree that people change. And I am willing to take the risk of working / hanging out with someone who has dealt drugs or stolen cars or even robbed banks. That's bec no one was hurt (at least intentionally) during these activities. But what if he intentionally hurt someone? Would you feel comfortable with that person roaming in the streets where their next target could be you or your family?
At some point there should be squatters rights to an identity.
What about the "true owner" of the identity, if there is one? In the article's case, there was a guy who was imprisoned for a couple of years and forcibly medicated because his identity was stolen.
ID thief pats rent and some back rent too.
Sorry, I meant, "pays" and not "pats"
If the identity is unused, sure.
But if you've been destroying someone else's life, as here, absolutely not.
The key part is you cannot change your birthday - that aspect makes it clear identity theft and not just use of a different given name (legal in many jurisdictions).
You can start going by another name. Nobody side eyes Bob for not going by Robert. What makes this different is the fraud.
It's problematic. I have a friend who is a parolee. He had trouble getting parole. It was only once he was out and parole officers kept looking at him funny and whispering about him having a fucked-up record that we looked into it and found someone else had used his identity while he was in prison and committed a dozen really heinous crimes which all got added to my friend's record somehow.
As long as they get some squatters lefts too.
I would be much more OK with what he did (at some point the stolen identity IS his identity), but not when there's a living person who also has that identity!!
Why were his benefits voided after 19 years of work? What does it have to do with identity?
How much leeway does HR have to yank earned benefits? After two decades of doing the work, seems like they are entitled.
If someone lied about getting a degree, would HR pull the 401k after a 20 year career? Faked a few certifications? Any lie is enough?
They can’t yank any vested money, whether it’s 401k contributions from the employer or accrued pension benefits. An employee of 19 years shouldn’t have lost much but missing a 20-year milestone for a pension might’ve hurt.
This is the case even if you’re convicted of a crime, let alone just fired.