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A high school homecoming queen has claimed her life was ruined after she and her vice principal mother were accused of rigging the contest at Tate High School by casting false votes.
Emily Rose Grover, 19, says she was wrongfully arrested and her civil rights were violated when she and her mother, Laura Carroll, were arrested in March 2021 for allegedly hacking privileged student information to cast hundreds of false votes in the 2020 competition at her school in Pensacola, Florida.
Grover did not plead the charges, which were dropped after she completed a supervised program, and now plans to file a lawsuit over the incident.
Recently, Grover filed a letter of intent in Escambia County, Florida, to reclaim her name and prove her innocence.
Carroll also lost her job as an elementary school vice principal at Bellview Elementary School in the same district.
Her lawyer also says that her client’s completion of the program does and does not indicate her fault and that the young girl is “trying to return to a semblance of normalcy.”
Emily Grover, 18, was arrested in March 2021 for allegedly hacking into Tate High School’s homecoming queen contest. Her Florida Western University admission and scholarship were subsequently revoked
Emily’s mother, Laura Carroll, a former vice principal, was also arrested for helping her daughter with the homecoming robbery
Grover celebrates her homecoming victory in October 2020
Her status as a homecoming queen would soon be questioned and become the subject of an ethical investigation that culminated in criminal charges, an eviction and her mother losing her job as vice principal.
“She needs to be able to start her life all over again without this wreckage from the past and live the normal life she intended to live.” Mattox told Wear TV.
One way she does that is by accepting an offer to join the Alpha Delta Pi sorority at the University of West Florida, where her full-ride scholarship acceptance was originally withdrawn following the scandal.
A girl, Baylee Sanders, who Grover went to church with, told the… New York Post she was surprised that Grover had been accepted into a sorority at her new school.
“Normally, from what I’ve heard, they’re the hard-core sorority. But then they take in a girl who’s been arrested and… [had] four loads!’
Sanders, 23, also talked about Emily’s “mean girl” persona for her big bust.
‘From what the other girls in the’ [friend] group said around her is that she was more of a mean girl in school, popular, etc. The way they made it sound was just like in the movie ‘Mean Girls’. She’s nice to people to their faces, but then talk behind their backs,” she said.
A sorority spokesperson told the outlet that by the time Emily Grover joined Alpha Delta Pi, she had been fully cleared of all charges.
Grover saw smiling in her mugshot photo after her arrest for hacking the homecoming league
Grover’s attorney Marie Mattox, who has filed a letter of intent to sue Florida law enforcement, says the teen’s civil rights were violated when she was arrested and a full investigation will clear her of any criminal wrongdoing
Tate High School in Pensacola, Florida, where Grover and Carroll reportedly cast 246 votes from their personal devices in favor of Grover’s homecoming queen campaign
While she’s getting used to a “normal” life, Emily recently accepted an offer from the University of West Florida’s Alpha Delta Pi sorority, of which her sister is a member.
‘This is a black cloud that travels everywhere with Emily,’ says her lawyer, Marie Mattox, who added that if a ‘thorough’ investigation had been conducted, the conclusion would have been that Grover ‘was not involved in criminal activity’ and “wasn’t involved in voting at all.”
Mattox added that her client remains “very, very vulnerable” after the ordeal.
Her life literally stood still for almost two years. After that, she had to reevaluate her life, keep everything in check and come back from this horrible experience and make her way to a normal life,” she told the Post.
Initially, Florida Department of Law Enforcement agents discovered evidence of unauthorized access to student information through Carroll’s administrator account.
The Daily Mail previously covered Grover’s case.
At the time, multiple Tate students and Grover’s peers told the media that the teen had long bragged about accessing privileged information through her mother’s account.
“I know Emily Grover has been logging into her mother’s school account since freshman year to access grades and test scores,” one student said in a statement to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.
“She looks up the numbers of all our friend group and makes comments about how she finds our test scores all the time.”
Another said, “It seemed like logging in wasn’t such a big deal and she was very comfortable with that.”
Ultimately, researchers found that as of 2019, Carroll had access to 372 high school records, 339 of which were Tate students.
At the time, Carroll had access to the school board’s program, authorities said, and was aware of her annual training on “Responsible Use of Technology Guidelines by Employees.”
The system includes information about student grades, medical history, test scores, attendance, disciplinary action, personnel information, emergency contacts, rosters, and student ID numbers. It was linked to an application called Election runner, which allowed students to vote for the homecoming court.
In an interview with Good morning America last year, Grover said that even when the school removed the hundreds of votes it labeled as fraudulently cast, she was still the homecoming queen candidate that garnered the most votes.