In spring of 2020, Autumn Grace Harris moved into her grandmother’s home on Wolf Ridge Road in Muncy Creek Township, and during the next four years, the now 23-year-old Muncy woman helped take care of the grandmother so she could remain independent, according to a state police affidavit. The grandmother gave Harris her credit cards with the stipulation that she use them only “for food and household items for both of them,” a criminal investigator wrote in the court document.

However between 2020 and last year, Harris, of 426 S. Washington St., used the woman’s credit cards on numerous occasions to buy personal items not only for herself, but for her then boyfriend in a desperate, but failed attempt to keep the relationship going, the investigator said. In a text message to her grandmother, “Harris talked about how she was in an unhealthy relationship with a boyfriend,” and that she had purchased things for him “to make him happy so he’d stay with me,” the affidavit stated.

As of the middle of May, Harris still owed her grandmother $147,355, police said. In other text messages, Harris appeared apologetic, telling her grandmother she “didn’t realize how much she had been spending, promising to pay it back,” the court document stated. “This was my doing. I have created this problem. I should have been more truthful with everyone involved. I never gave straight facts,” she texted the victim.

Harris has been arraigned before District Judge Kirsten Gardner on felony charges of financial exploitation of an older adult, theft and receiving stolen property. She has waived her preliminary hearing and is free on $25,000 bail.