FARGO, N.D. (Valley News Live) – A North Dakota woman who was sentenced to 180 days in jail in Cass County for defrauding healthcare providers and Medicaid programs is now facing additional fraud charges in Minnesota.

Christine Marie Pryor, 55, pleaded guilty in November 2024 to theft by deception involving more than $50,000. She was sentenced to first serve 180 days with a 3-year sentence suspended. She received credit for 44 days already served.

Pryor was ordered to pay $82,584.78 in restitution to Southeast Human Services in Fargo, where she worked between 2018 and 2019.

How the scheme unfolded

According to court documents, Pryor worked at multiple healthcare facilities in North Dakota and Minnesota between 2018 and 2023, using the identities and credentials of three licensed professionals without their knowledge. She submitted fraudulent Capella University diplomas and transcripts to gain employment.

Investigators say Pryor admitted she searched state licensing websites for therapists who shared her first name, then used those therapists’ last names and license numbers when applying for jobs.

At Southeast Human Services, where she worked as a Licensed Addiction Counselor, Pryor earned $55,584.82 while providing therapy services to approximately 150 patients. She also opened her own counseling center, NIAM Brain Injury Center, in Fargo between 2020 and 2021, and worked at The Lotus Center in Moorhead, Minnesota, from 2021 to 2023.

Court documents say the three licensed professionals whose identities were used told investigators they had no knowledge of Pryor’s actions and did not give her permission to use their information.

Two additional charges against Pryor in North Dakota, unauthorized use of personal identifying information, were dismissed on motion of the state.

Additional charges in Minnesota

Pryor is also facing charges in Minnesota. Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison announced on Tuesday charges against Pryor in Clay County District Court for six theft offenses and six identity theft offenses related to defrauding Minnesota’s Medicaid program of more than $150,000.

According to the Minnesota complaint, Pryor claimed to provide psychotherapy and alcohol and drug counseling services to Medicaid recipients despite having no license or credentials to do so. Prosecutors allege she used the credentials and identities of three licensed professionals while claiming to provide Medicaid-funded services to 169 clients.

The Minnesota charges were filed as part of National Health Care Fraud Takedown Day, a joint effort involving the Department of Justice and more than 40 state Medicaid Fraud Control Units.

North Dakota State playing in the FCS playoffs and College Football Playoff in back-to-back years? It’s likelier than you think.

That’s because on Wednesday, according to a report from Ross Dellenger of Yahoo! Sports, the NCAA Division I cabinet voted to repeal a rule that effectively barred teams transitioning from FCS to FBS from playing in postseason games in their first FBS seasons. The Bison are making that move along with Sacramento State in 2026.

The reported change has been a long time coming; the rule has hampered teams from immediate bowl eligibility for decades. Its good intentions of dissuading teams from rashly making the FCS-to-FBS leap have been rendered obsolete in recent years by the fact that programs generally arrive in FBS more prepared than ever before.

Consider the number of new FBS teams that have had to work within the provision in the past decade alone

That list includes: Liberty (home for the holidays at 6–6 in 2018), James Madison (8–3 in 2022 under coach Curt Cignetti, and barely able to play in a bowl at 11–1 in ’23 due to a lack of bowl-eligible teams), Jacksonville State (8–4 in ’23 before backing in like the Dukes), Missouri State (7–5 in 2025, also backed in) and Delaware (6–6 in ’25, ditto).

James Madison in particular became a cause célèbre in ’23 because it started the season 10-0, climbing as high as No. 18 in the AP Poll in mid-November. Then-Virginia attorney general Jason Miyares bandied about suing the NCAA before the Dukes lost 26–23 to Appalachian State, an event that caused the program to back off and accept a bid to play Air Force in the Armed Forces Bowl. James Madison lost that game 31–21, by which time Cignetti had left for Indiana.

There was a time when the FCS-to-FBS jump was an imposing one, and the NCAA did not want to incentivize making it lightly—not even a proud Florida A&M program could make a mid-2000s attempt at a jump stick. However, the Flames, Dukes and other teams have shown it’s not so great a climb for programs with the right resources and management.

Now the Bison and the Hornets stand to benefit.

How far can North Dakota State and Sacramento State go in the near term?

The Bison opened 12–0 last year before a shock loss to Illinois State in the FCS playoffs’ second round, so that question may answer itself. North Dakota State does not play a single Power 4 team—a potential strength-of-schedule albatross if it has designs on really surging. A potential roadblock: the fact that the Bison have to visit the Mountain West’s two favorites, UNLV (Oct. 10) and New Mexico (Oct. 24).

It’s a different story for the Hornets, a 7–5 squad a year ago whose move to the FBS is widely seen as a gamble on their growth potential. Sacramento State also does not play a major-conference team, but has a breakneck travel schedule ahead of it—the Hornets will visit Ypsilanti, Mich.; Bowling Green, Ohio; Muncie, Ind.; Mount Pleasant, Mich. and Honolulu. Combine that with a first-year coach—Oakland native and ex-MC Hammer choreographer Alonzo Carter—and it could be a long FBS debut in California’s capital.

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DAHLEN, N.D. — Four years ago, Lon Enerson started writing a book about his uncle, Staff Sgt. Irvin C. Ellingson, and the work to identify his remains.

As Enerson stood in front of the Dahlen Lutheran Church on Saturday, June 20, a casket inside waited for the

funeral and burial

of Ellingson, a soldier who waited 81 years to come home.

“I never thought I would get the final chapter,” Enerson said.

Enerson, along with scores of Ellingson relatives, waited to hear about the identification of Sgt. Ellingson from Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam in Honolulu, Hawaii, where efforts took place to identify soldiers who died in a Tokyo prison fire during World War II. Ellingson was the third to be identified, with 10 successfully identified so far.

There were a number of Gold Star families — those whose relatives died in the line of duty — present at the Ellingson funeral. Enerson had attended a funeral at Arlington National Cemetery of the second person to be identified.

“We’re cheering for each other,” he said.

Ellingson was 25 and serving as a radar observer on a B-29 in the Pacific Theater when, on April 14, 1945, his plane was shot down during a bombing mission over mainland Japan. He was captured alongside 61 other Air Corps members, interrogated and held at a Tokyo prison. A few weeks later, on May 26, an Allied bombing run over Japan sparked a fire at the prison, killing Ellingson and the others.

The Ellingson family’s wait to bring home his remains began that year, and 81 years later, it finally happened. Enerson said the passion his grandparents felt when Ellingson died filtered down to him and his generation. It created, he said, a “common bond that we needed to get him home.”

In 2018, Enerson received a letter from Michael Krehl, instigator of the search to identify and recover the remains of the prison fire soldiers. Krehl was told by the Defense POW MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) about a process involving DNA that could identify the remains. To get the remains — interred at the American Cemetery in Manila — to Hawaii to start the identification process, 60% of the 62 families of the soldiers had to submit DNA, since the remains were commingled.

Enerson’s mother had died the year before, but two uncles, Bud and Dennis Ellingson, were still alive. They both gave their DNA, along with Enerson.

“I called them, and they were overwhelmed to tears,” Enerson said. “I said ‘I’m going to give the DPAA your address and they’re going to send you DNA sample kits.’ So we got three Ellingson DNA there. Sibling DNA is like gold.”

Barbara Geisler, a family genealogist who found Enerson so he could be sent the letter, prayed over Ellingson’s casket at Saturday’s funeral.

She said the group had to find the families for both missing and identified soldiers.

“We went for the missing first. We thought it was most important,” she said.

Though the Ellingson family submitted their DNA, by November of 2021 the percentage of given DNA was stuck at 59.68%, Enerson said. The family went to Washington, D.C., to speak with 17 senators, including North Dakota Sens. John Hoeven and Kevin Cramer, who signed a bipartisan letter to then-Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin to get the remains.

As the letter went through, one more person submitted DNA to get over the 60% threshold, Enerson said. In spring 2022, the caskets were brought to the lab in Hawaii to begin the identification process.

Kristen Grow and Melissa Menschel were two forensic anthropologists involved in the process. Grow led the Tokyo Prison Fire project in 2024 and Menschel joined last year. They said the process involves an inventory of the remains, taking samples, finding what remains go together and looking at chemical signatures of the bones. There are also forensic odontologists who analyze teeth.

Both Grow and Menschel were present for the funeral and burial.

From 2022 to 2025 seven groups of Ellingsons visited the lab to “potentially be in that same place as Irvin would be,” Enerson said.

“There was no guarantee all along, but we always told them that the Ellingson family does have one guarantee — and that is that we’re not going to stop looking for him,” he said.

Last summer, the family got the call that Ellingson had been identified. The family was told his remains would be escorted home and a full military honors funeral would be provided all at government expense. In September, the family formed a committee made up of family members to map out the details. Enerson said the family decided upon three days of celebration.

Terry Ellingson, Enerson’s cousin, said it “takes a village to get this done.”

“Everybody decided to take care of a certain area,” he said Saturday. “It all got done, but it took a lot of contacts. Even this morning, we were short of buses for people to go to the cemetery. (And then came) a call that Midway Public Schools would provide a couple more buses for us.”

Through it all, Enerson held tight to one sentence within a deceased personnel file he received. It contained all the information the government went through to locate Ellingson.

“The sentence goes like this: ‘Sgt. McGrath saw Staff Sgt. Irvin Ellingson being interrogated at the Kempeitai military headquarters in Tokyo, leaving with 2nd Lt. Andrew Litz, to the Tokyo Military Prison,’” Enerson said. “That was a sentence that I hung onto, and we all hung onto.”

Enerson noted that 2nd Lt. Litz’s nephew and niece were at the Saturday funeral, too.

Enerson has been collecting information through the eight-plus years it took to get Ellingson home. Four years ago, people told him, “Lon, if something happens to you, no one’s going to know (this information),” he said.

“So, I started writing a book,” he said.

His sister, Jane Wood, is editing.

“He’s almost to 400 pages,” she said.

Eric Hylden / Grand Forks Herald