If spending four straight hours in Imperial Beach building sand castles in heated team competition seems intense, so might Cindy Dobler Davis’ workload as a San Diego deputy city attorney.

Davis, 39, a San Diego native who attended both SDSU as an undergraduate and USD as a law student, deals with identity theft, one of the more prominent crimes in consumer protection. She spends her time hunting down “multiple aliases and profiles” to build legal cases in the office of the City Attorney’s Consumer and Environmental Protection unit.

Davis has a zeal to “identify identity theft and do as much consumer advocacy as I can.” Her most heavily publicized consumer protection case came earlier this year and involved 111 victims of fraud, where the defendant pretended he was a television repairman who would retain customers’ sets for an indefinite period of time. In the end, the defendant pleaded guilty to multiple counts of forgery, fraud and false advertising.

This same enthusiasm Davis has demonstrated for her job of three and one-half years has kept her active in a variety of civic projects, including the San Diego Volunteer Lawyers Program and the Domestic Violence Prevention Project.

When it comes to leisure time, one of Davis’ most towering achievements, with a competitive time limit and space constraints, was the creation of a giant, sand-sculpted tea party, complete with animal guests and their tableware. Her family is not unfamiliar with sand; her husband of nine years, Donald, is an Imperial Beach lifeguard.

— Sam Schramski