Facebook probe lands felony harassment charge
An Allen realtor pleaded guilty on Dec. 8 to a felony harassment charge after accessing an ex-employee’s Facebook account and using it to send insulting messages to her friends.
James Patrick Delagarza, 41, owns First Premier Realty, a real estate agency that sells homes in Allen, Anna, Frisco, Garland, McKinney and Plano. He was sentenced to six years of probation and fined $2,000 after pleading guilty to one count of online harassment.
The victim, Jessica Smith of Princeton, complained of the harassment to the Collin County Sheriff’s Office on July 15, 2010, the same day she suddenly ended her employment with Delagarza’s agency. Smith said she worked for the agency as an office administrator for four months before quitting.
Smith said she first noticed something was wrong when she was unable to access her Facebook account later that day and was forced to use the website’s password reset process.
She then noticed her profile picture had been changed and posts had been made on her friend’s pages without her knowledge.
“I started looking at the comments and looking at what was written and realized at that point that something was very drastically wrong,” she said.
One comment suggested to an overweight friend of Smith’s that she should skip a few meals. Another comment, sent to a friend whose dog had just died, downplayed the importance of the pet’s death.
“They were completely random,” Smith said. “They were all basically designed to make it look like I was being hurtful to other people.”
After re-accessing her account and posting a status update notifying her friends of the unauthorized access, Smith was kicked off Facebook and unable to re-access her account. After resetting her password again, she noticed that her most recent post had been deleted. Within minutes, she was kicked off the site again and her account was deactivated.
While attempting to reset her password and contact her friends to notify them of the unauthorized nature of the posts, Smith became aware that her Yahoo! email account had also been accessed as a way to continue changing her Facebook password. Six years worth of emails had also been deleted.
“I had my friends in tears over the hurtful things being said, and then I’ve got people attacking me in their defense,” she said. “It all happened so quickly. It was a lot to take in at one time.”
After calling the sheriff’s office and filing a report, Smith began talking to others who had worked for First Premier and determined the harasser to be Delagarza, whose agency she left after “constantly being disrespected by Mr. Delagarza” and “working under a hostile work environment,” according to Delagarza’s arrest affidavit.
Investigators obtained a log of all IP addresses that signed into Smith’s email account the day of the incident. A court order was then issued to Verizon Internet Services for the subscriber information of an IP address that appeared different from the others used that day to log into the account.
The IP address was identified as belonging to Delagarza, and a search warrant was executed at his Allen residence on Aug. 26. Officers said they found Delagarza attempting to conceal his computer under his desk when they arrived to serve the warrant.
Smith said she is still not sure how Delagarza accessed her account, although Smith says she believes it was done using a software that records keystrokes entered on company computers.
Since the ordeal, Smith said she has been able to secure employment, though she is making less money and has experienced difficulty finding employment.
“I’m going for job interviews and they’re asking why I can’t contact my previous employer,” she said. “There’s not really a good answer to that that doesn’t sound either completely crazy or like a completely disgruntled employee, or just a drama fest that potential employers right now don’t want to deal with.”
In 2004, Delagarza was featured by CNN Money Magazine’s “Millionaires in the Making” series. Repeated attempts to contact him via his home, work and cell numbers were unsuccessful.
Smith said her trust in future employers has also been shaken by the experience.
“He seemed like a normal guy whenever I interviewed with him, and obviously he wasn’t, so how do I know what kind of situation I’m getting myself into going back into the workforce?” she said.
