Puerto Rico’s former education secretary, Julia Keleher, a Cardinal O’Hara High School graduate, would often rail against the island’s culture of corruption, reports the 74million.org.

Yet she and five others were indicted in July as part of an alleged conspiracy to illegally direct more than $15 million in federal funds to organizations with personal and political connections.

Keleher and her co-defendants pleaded not guilty to the charges, and her attorney stressed that she is not accused of benefiting financially from the scheme.

In a speech just four days after her abrupt resignation, Keleher offered a defiant and bitter narrative of pushing for change against corruption.

Before becoming secretary, she remarked that getting things done in Puerto Rico’s tangled education system amounted to “basically political favoritism.”

“Who you knew determined what job you had, irrespective of your experience or your capacity to perform,” she said.

Keleher also worked on a U.S. Department of Education team years ago tasked with fixing compliance problems involving waste, fraud and mismanagement of federal funds in Puerto Rico’s school system.

Her role on the other side of the island’s federal education probes is one of many lingering riddles to have emerged since her arrest.

Read more about Keleher here.