Lyle Lindsey died as a toddler. So why was he racking up convictions and student debt decades later?
Investigators uncovered a Senegalese man using a dead child’s identity for 31 years, court records show
SAN DIEGO —
It was 1957 when 1-year-old Lyle Keith Lindsey bolted from his mother’s side in the yard of a Point Loma trailer park and into the path of a slow-moving car. He died in a police car on the way to the hospital.
Yet in the decades he’s been buried at Fort Rosecrans National Cemetery, he has been convicted of numerous crimes, from drug sales and DUI to vehicle burglary and robbery. He has received $88,000 in food stamps, federal student loans and Pell Grants. And he’s received a master’s degree from San Diego State University.
It wasn’t until 2016 that the discrepancy was noticed.
Turns out, a Senegalese man in the United States illegally had assumed the dead child’s identity since 1988.
On Thursday, Almamy Baba Ly, 65, pleaded guilty in San Diego federal court to identity fraud and theft of public property.
“This was an especially sophisticated and devious fraud that victimized U.S. taxpayers for decades and forced a family to revisit a traumatic loss,” said U.S. Attorney Robert Brewer.
According to the complaint, the investigation was initiated by the Department of State’s Diplomatic Security Services, which notified the California Department of Motor Vehicles that 36 people were suspected of using the identities of deceased individuals — most who’d died as infants or very young children — to obtain driver’s licenses or ID cards.
It is unclear how exactly the fraud came to the government’s attention.
Investigators from the DMV and Border Patrol took the lead in running down Lindsey’s case.
Lindsey was issued a Social Security number in 1988 as a 32-year-old man, his identity verified with what turned out to be an altered birth certificate, according to the plea agreement.
A string of arrests soon followed, starting with drug sales in Los Angeles in 1989, according to court records.
Lindsey applied for a driver’s license in 1994 in Compton. He would renew it multiple times over the years.
The DMV records led investigators to the last known address of the impersonator, an apartment on Spring Street in La Mesa. The rental agreement listed two tenants: Lindsey — a cook receiving $1,200 a month in student financial aid — and Amadou Samba Ly.
Investigators followed the trail and dug into Department of Education financial aid documents, finding Lindsey had named Samba Ly as his brother.
Samba Ly had similar identity problems of his own, investigators soon learned.
The brother had also assumed the identity of a dead U.S. child, allowing him to obtain a Social Security card and California driver’s license in 1988, according to his immigration file. But he also applied for a U.S. passport, which ultimately unmasked him.
Samba Ly was convicted in 1989. But while still under indictment, he applied for permanent residence in the U.S. On his application, he listed 10 siblings. Investigators would later learn that he’d conveniently left out one, Almamy Baba Ly, aka Lindsey, said Special Assistant U.S. Attorney Jeffrey Hill.
Records indicate Samba Ly left the U.S. in 2017 and has not returned, according to the complaint.
Still unsure of the real identity of Lindsey impersonator, investigators turned to social media. An email address linked Lindsey to a Facebook profile for “Baba Ly.” The user’s profile photo matched Lindsey’s DMV photos, much of the postings were in languages spoken in Senegal, and the activity included correspondence with two Ly siblings.
Investigators also traced wire transfers from Lindsey to four siblings in France, Sierra Leone, Senegal and Mauritania, the complaint states.
Agents arrested the impersonator in July. The arrest warrant was for John Doe, because authorities still didn’t know his real name.
Investigators had been brainstorming even more ways to find out, though. One idea involved sending investigators to a rural Senegal town to sift through birth records, Hill said.
But agents got lucky. During a search of the La Mesa apartment, they found the impersonator’s real identification. The Senegal consulate had recently issued Almamy Baba Ly a national identification, complete with his picture, true name and date of birth. He was actually born nearly two years earlier than the real Lindsey, in Saint-Louis, Senegal.
While it is unclear how Baba Ly came to the United States, records indicate his brother came legally on a visa in the 1970s or ‘80s, Hill said.
Sometime after serving prison time for a robbery, Baba Ly had applied for some $84,000 in student loans and grants. He attended San Diego City College and then SDSU, earning a bachelor’s degree and master’s degree in social services. He hasn’t paid back any of the loans, Hill said, nor was he eligible to receive them in the first place.
In 2015, he was highlighted — under the name Lyle Lindsey — as a member of the Black Students Social Work Caucus on the SDSU website.
“I plan on pursuing a career in mental health, serving persons with mental illness,” he wrote. “I plan on coming back for a Doctorate in Social Work.” He also noted the joy of becoming an Aztec “after years in skid row and being in and out of jails and prisons.”
Baba Ly also admitted to applying for $4,500 in food stamps.
As part of his plea, he has agreed to pay the federal and county government a combined $88,551 in restitution. Sentencing is set for December.
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