Crime Problem · Medicaid Fraud · Washington · June 2, 2026

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He Sent Fake Nurses Into Nursing Homes. A Washington Jury Just Convicted Him on All Eleven Counts.

For more than two years, families across Washington state trusted that the people changing their parents’ dressings and handing out their medications were licensed nurses. According to a King County jury, many of them were not. They were unlicensed, unqualified strangers operating under the stolen identities of five real Washington nurses — and some of them, prosecutors said, could not so much as take a blood pressure reading.

The man behind the scheme was David Mungai Njengaof Kent, who ran a sham staffing agency, billed long-term care facilities for the “nurses” he supplied, and kept most of the money. On May 28, 2026, the jury found him guilty on all eleven counts — including the rare charge of leading organized crime, a Class A felony that the Attorney General’s Office says had never before anchored a Washington Medicaid fraud trial.

The prosecution came from the office of Washington Attorney General Nick Brown (D-WA), whose Medicaid Fraud & Abuse Division built the case from a 2019 referral. The facts below trace to that office’s own June 1, 2026 release and to the Seattle outlets that covered the verdict. Njenga faces sentencing on June 16; a co-defendant is a fugitive.

• 11guilty verdicts — on all counts, including leading organized crime, a Class A felony — WA Attorney General’s Office · June 1, 2026
• 5real licensed nurses whose identities were stolen to staff the scheme — WA AG · KOMO News
• 16.5 yrsmaximum prison exposure at sentencing (a 12-to-16.5-year range) — WA AG · KIRO 7
• $81,000in default civil judgments — $40,500 against each of his two sham companies — WA Medicaid Fraud & Abuse Division
• 6+Washington communities where imposter nurses were placed in care facilities — WA AG · KOIN 6

Eleven counts, eleven convictions. The jury did not split the difference.

On May 28, 2026, a King County Superior Court jury convicted David Mungai Njenga on every count the state brought: one count of leading organized crime(a Class A felony), five counts of first-degree identity theft, one count of second-degree identity theft, three counts of first-degree theft, and one count of second-degree theft. The Attorney General’s Office called it the first Washington Medicaid fraud trial to carry a leading-organized-crime charge.

That charge matters. “Leading organized crime” under Washington law is not a label prosecutors reach for lightly — it requires proving the defendant intentionally organized, managed, directed, supervised, or financed three or more people in a pattern of criminal profiteering. The state argued, and the jury agreed, that Njenga ran exactly that: a structured enterprise built on theft, with him at the top.

Njenga is scheduled to be sentenced on June 16, 2026 in King County Superior Court, where he faces a range of roughly 12 to 16.5 years in prison — a maximum the AG’s office pegs at 198 months — plus up to $50,000 in penalties. Until then, the verdict stands as the headline fact: a jury heard the evidence and convicted on everything.

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Steal a real nurse’s license. Rent out a stranger. Bill Medicaid for the difference.

Between May 2017 and October 2019, prosecutors said, Njenga ran what the AG’s office described as a multifaceted criminal enterprise. He obtained the identities and credentials of five licensed Washington nurses, then used those stolen documents — in at least one instance building fake IDs from another person’s fingerprints — to make unqualified workers look like licensed professionals on paper.

He operated through a staffing company first registered as Heritage Medical Staffing, Inc., later renamed Pro Med Alliance Medical Staffing, Inc., both based in Kent. The companies pitched the imposters to nursing homes and long-term care facilities as licensed nurses, collected payment for their work — payment that flowed in part from the taxpayer-funded Medicaid program — and paid the imposters a fraction of what a real nurse would earn. Njenga, the state said, kept the rest.

This was never just a billing crime. The victims were elderly and sick.

The dollars are real, but the patient-safety record is what lifts this case above an ordinary fraud. According to the Attorney General’s office, some of the imposter nurses lacked basic healthcare knowledge — including how to take a patient’s blood pressure — and in some cases dispensed the wrong medications to residents who could not have known the person in scrubs had never been trained.

Long-term care residents are among the most dependent patients in the system: many are frail, cognitively impaired, or simply unable to advocate for themselves. Placing untrained strangers at their bedsides — and billing the public for the privilege — is the kind of failure that an accountability site exists to document, with names attached.

“This verdict is the result of our team's commitment to cracking down on Medicaid fraud and ensuring the safety of our health system.”

Washington Attorney General Nick Brown (D-WA) · June 1, 2026

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The case has names attached — including one the state still can’t find. A co-defendant left the country.

This conviction is a credit to a Democratic attorney general’s office, and we name it as such: the prosecution was brought by Washington Attorney General Nick Brown (D-WA) through his Medicaid Fraud & Abuse Division. The thread began with a 2019 referral from the Pierce County Prosecutor’s Office, after that office charged a woman for using fraudulent documents to pose as a registered nurse — documents investigators traced back to Njenga.

One name is conspicuously absent from the verdict sheet. A co-defendant, Everlyn Njuki, was not tried alongside Njenga: she is alleged to have left the country, and a bench warrant has been issued for her arrest. As an uncharged-at-trial fugitive whose case is unresolved, she is presumed innocent of the allegations against her.

Washington is one node in a national credential-fraud problem. The federal version was even bigger.

Fake-nurse schemes are not a Seattle aberration. In 2023, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General led Operation Nightingale, a multi-state takedown of a fraudulent-diploma pipeline that generated roughly 7,600 bogus nursing credentials out of Florida-based schools, some of which holders used to sit for the national licensing exam and treat patients. Dozens were charged across phases of the operation.

The through-line is the same: staffing shortages and surface-level credential checks let unqualified people slip into bedside roles, while taxpayer-funded programs foot the bill. Medicaid and Medicare fraud is, by industry estimates, a roughly $100,000,000,000-a-yearproblem nationally. The Washington verdict is one jurisdiction’s answer to it — and a template for the leading-organized-crime charge other states could borrow.

A documented crime, a named ringleader, a measurable cost. That is the whole assignment.

This is the cleanest kind of accountability story: a verdict, not an allegation. A King County jury weighed the evidence and convicted on all eleven counts. The harm is concrete — stolen identities, defrauded Medicaid billings, elderly patients exposed to untrained hands — and the consequences are concrete too: up to 16.5 years of prison exposure and $81,000 in civil judgments against the shell companies.

We follow the facts where they lead, including when the prosecutorial credit belongs to a Democratic attorney general. Nick Brown’s Medicaid Fraud & Abuse Division built and won this case; we say so plainly. The accountability frame here points at the convicted fraudster and the fugitive co-defendant — and at the systemic gap, in Washington and nationally, that let imposters reach a patient’s bedside in the first place.

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