AUBURN — A Lewiston woman who collected welfare while getting monthly trust payments was sentenced to serve three years in prison and pay back more than $170,000 of state money.

Michelle Grimmo, 46, of 2 Mark St. pleaded guilty to felony theft by deception and aggravated forgery after carrying out a scheme to defraud the Maine Department of Health and Human Services of money by “intentionally failing to disclose or report her income, her shelter expense and/or her assets, all of which impressions were false” and which she didn’t believe were true, according to an Androscoggin County grand jury indictment.

Each of those charges is punishable by up to 10 years in prison.

She also pleaded guilty to two related misdemeanors for falsifying state documents.

Androscoggin County Superior Court Justice MaryGay Kennedy sentenced Grimmo to seven years in prison for the theft charge, but suspended four years of that sentence. She also ordered that Grimmo be placed on probation for three years after her release from prison.

Kennedy ordered Grimmo to repay DHHS $172,110.82.

Grimmo’s sentence of 30 days each for the other three charges is to be served at the same time as her three-year sentence.

She also pleaded guilty to a drug-trafficking charge stemming from a 2013 arrest for 100 oxycodone pills and a .40-caliber Smith and Wesson pistol she kept in a safe at her home. She told the judge the gun belonged to her son, who was in Afghanistan.

On that charge, she was sentenced to six years in prison, with all but two years suspended, plus three years of probation. She will serve that sentence at the same time as the welfare fraud, Kennedy said. Grimmo agreed to forfeit $3,600 cash in what police believed to be drug profits that was found near the pills in a search of her house. She also forfeited the gun that was seized.

Investigators said Grimmo lied to receive benefits from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (formerly food stamps,) the Transitional Food Assistance Program, the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, the Emergency Assistance program, the Transitional Child Care Program, the Transitional Transportation Program and MaineCare.

Some of the charges dated back nearly a decade. In 2007 Grimmo lied about her expenses and income to receive various welfare benefits, according to Assistant Attorney General Darcy Mitchell.

Grimmo lived in a house she owned but claimed she was renting. She also failed to disclose a monthly income of $3,500 from a trust fund left by her grandmother a decade earlier. The trust also paid some of Grimmo’s expenses, Mitchell said.

Grimmo forged a letter in 2010 from someone who claimed to own her house, served as her landlord and wrote that she paid $850 per month in rent.

In DHHS applications twice in 2013, she misstated the amount of money she paid monthly for housing, investigators wrote in court papers.

She also never reported other assets, including a snowmobile and an ATV, Mitchell said.

Grimmo is expected to turn herself in at the Androscoggin County Jail on Sept. 27 to begin serving her sentence. She was given a stay by the judge because she has a grandchild who just started attending kindergarten and she cares for a child with special needs, her attorney, Scott Lynch, told the judge.

Lynch said the welfare fraud charges against his client were stronger than the drug charge but said there was a chance a judge or jury might have convicted Grimmo had that case gone to trial, so an overall plea including the drug charge appeared prudent.

[email protected]