Probation revoked for woman who admitted to stealing money from crash victim

A Williamsburg woman who had previously pleaded guilty to stealing money from a man minutes after he was killed in a motorcycle crash is back in jail after violating her probation.

Forty-one-year-old Alishia McElfresh appeared in Whitley Circuit Court Tuesday morning on a motion to revoke her probation.

Under the terms of a plea agreement Guilty plea on Dec. 13, McElfresh was sentenced to two years in prison, conditionally discharged for two years so long as she did not violate the condition of her probation.

At Tuesday’s hearing, McElfresh’s probation officer testified that when McElfresh came into the probation and parole office and took a drug test, she tested positive for methamphetamine, suboxone and marijuana.

The officer told the court McElfresh told him, “I should have just never come in.”

In addition, the probation officer told the court that McElfresh had been associating with two known felons.

“She knows she screwed up,” public advocate Ron Findell told Judge Dan Ballou.

Ballou then shortened the hearing asking, “Is this the defendant that took money off a dead man?”

After being told it was, Ballou sustained the motion by prosecutors to revoke McElfresh’s probation.

The crash occurred July 26 on Ky. 1064 in the Whetstone community of Whitley County.

Thirty-six-year-old Scott B. Bray of Poplar Creek was pronounced dead at the scene.

“He was traveling north when he rounded a curve, went off the road, over the embankment and struck a tree,” said Whitley County Sheriff Colan Harrell.

Witness reported seeing a woman at the scene of the crash going through Bray’s pockets.

Through the course of an investigation by Sgt. Todd Shelley and Sgt. Dave Lennon, Harrell said the woman was identified as McElfresh.

McElfresh was charged with one count of theft by unlawful taking of the value under $500 and tampering with physical evidence.

McElfresh remains in the Whitley County Detention Center.