A federal prosecutor will recommend a two-year sentence for Patrick Robert McKee, 75, of Burlington, when he is sentenced in U.S. District Court in Bismarck on Jan. 4, 2022.

According to court documents filed in the federal case, McKee will agree to plead guilty to four federal charges and one charge of using a fraudulent identity to obtain hydrocodone will be dismissed.

McKee had been using the name William Patrick O’Hara and had been working at Walmart in Minot. Law enforcement agents went to the Walmart on Feb. 18 to see if McKee was the same man as the deceased man whose Social Security number he had been using. They discovered they were two different men.

According to court documents, O’Hara filed for a new Social Security card in 1997, using an Ohio driver’s license he had obtained using the stolen identity. He used the stolen identity to obtain an Ohio probate court order changing his name to “William Patrick O’Hara” and then used the probate court order to have a new Social Security card issued in the name of William Patrick O’Hara. At some point he moved to North Dakota, where he applied for a USDA Rural Development backed mortgage to buy a house in Burlington in 2017 using the stolen identity. At one point he had married a woman in 1997 in Ohio who knew him as “William O’Hara.” She divorced him in 2011 and has since passed away. His former wife’s relatives told authorities that “O’Hara” told the woman he had needed to get a “new birth certificate” to get a new Social Security card in about 1997.

According to a law enforcement affidavit, the rightful holder of the Social Security number that McKee has been using died in Michigan in 2017. Prior to his death, the man had apparently had issues when he filed his taxes because of the identity theft.

McKee’s subterfuge came to light after he used the stolen identity on a USDA home mortgage loan application in North Dakota in 2017 and to obtain health insurance from Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Dakota.

McKee is currently in custody at the Ward County Jail.