UC Davis student arrested for drug dealing months after featured as state success story

A Sacramento County judge believed she had earned a second chance. After serving roughly three years in secure juvenile custody for a killing committed when she was fifteen, the young woman was deemed ready to step down into California's Less Restrictive Programming—a state system designed to move juvenile offenders out of locked facilities into community settings before their sentences end. In December 2025, she moved into a dorm at UC Davis as part of Underground Scholars, a university program for incarcerated and formerly incarcerated students. Seven months later, officers searching her room found marijuana, vape cartridges, a digital scale, text messages documenting drug sales, $4,121 in cash, and live ammunition hidden in a sock in her dresser.

The arrest in July 2026 arrived as a sharp puncture in a narrative the state had been carefully constructing. Months earlier, California's Office of Youth and Community Restoration had featured the twenty-year-old as a success story—proof that the system works. She served as a youth advocate for the agency, traveling to speak on juvenile justice issues. Her court order required weekly meetings with the Underground Scholars director as a condition of her placement. She was working ten hours a week as a paid peer mentor, attending summer school, and nearing completion of her degree when she was arrested as an adult in her dorm room.

Now she faces charges in two counties running in parallel: felony possession of ammunition by a prohibited person, misdemeanor possession of ammunition on school grounds, and misdemeanor possession of marijuana for sale in Yolo County, where UC Davis sits. Separately, she faces a probation violation in Sacramento County Juvenile Court tied to her original 2021 case. She pleaded not guilty and posted a $25,000 bail bond. The state has not publicly explained how a student under active court supervision, with a director required to meet with her weekly, allegedly accumulated the materials and cash that officers documented in her room.

Her case is not isolated. In 2021, a seventeen-year-old girl was convicted of murdering Fresno State student Sergio Bonboster—his body was dismembered, burned, and dumped in a canal. Now in her twenties, she was reportedly enrolled at Sacramento State last year, released under Project Rebound, the Cal State version of Underground Scholars. The victim's family publicly protested her early release after she served just two years of a four-year murder sentence. Sacramento State declined to confirm her enrollment, citing privacy. In Los Angeles, a private company has been running a similar program in student housing on UCLA's sorority row, with LA County paying the company $1.2 million in 2025 to house nine young adults.

What makes these cases particularly troubling is what the state cannot—or will not—say about the programs themselves. California's Office of Youth and Community Restoration, which partners with the educational pathway programs and describes them as building a "prison-to-university pipeline," could not tell investigators how many young people are enrolled in these programs, which schools they attend, or where state funding flows. The agency could not provide recidivism or success rate data: how many participants violated probation, were arrested, or successfully completed the program. It said that responsibility falls to counties, not the state, and that collecting the information centrally falls outside its authority.

The opacity extends to the programs themselves. UC Davis reported that ninety-two students were enrolled in Underground Scholars in 2026, with fourteen graduating that year. But the state's own public list of Underground Scholars partner campuses does not include UC Davis—the same campus where the young woman at the center of this story was placed. The agency featured her as a youth advocate in a state presentation earlier this year, yet said it does not fund UC Davis's program and referred supervision questions to the county. UC Davis declined to answer questions about her day-to-day supervision, including whether her required weekly meetings with the program director continued through July.

A bill meant to bring transparency to the Less Restrictive Programming system passed the state Senate 37-1 in May. It was held in the Assembly Appropriations Committee's suspense file on August 13—killed without a floor vote or public explanation, using a procedural mechanism lawmakers routinely employ to quietly shelve legislation. Assembly Appropriations Committee Chair Buffy Wicks, who controls what survives her committee, did not respond to questions about her decision. Speaker Robert Rivas's office provided no on-the-record response either. The full accounting of how these programs operate will require contacting roughly twenty CSU campuses, eight or more UC campuses, and dozens of community colleges individually, since no state agency compiles the numbers in one place. That work is ongoing.