My Moms iPad is activation locked

This has been nothing short of frustrating...

My mother calls me up the other day saying that she can't access her iPad. She is far from tech savvy and her english can get her by at best. She told me she was cleaning the iPad but had the screen on... as doing so I would have guessed that she entered the passcode inadvertently too many times and too often that the iPad locked her out of it. I'm not even sure how the activation lock got activated in the first place. But alas here we are with a locked iPad. I asked her for the email and password she has associated with her iPhone. I enter the credentials and its a no go. So i sign into her iCloud from a desktop computer and notice that only her iPhone is connected to that account. After looking closer at her locked iPad it says the email associated with her iPad is "s******@icloud.com". But the email for the account associated with her iPhone does not start with an "s".

So I call my sister up thinking that she's the one that gave her the iPad so i would assume that she set it up for her. Going back and forth for almost 30 minutes then she tells me that she got her the phone not the iPad..... *facepalm... It was my brother who got it for a couple years back and he was the one who set it up for her. So i go ahead and call him up. Asks him for the username & password. He remembers the username but not the password. So i say ok.. I can at least try to reset the password since i know the email now. So I go ahead and go to the iCloud site and go through the steps of resetting the password. Tried resetting it by answering the security questions... can't get any correct. Call my brother back up and he can't specifically recall what the password was. Tried many combinations until we get locked out temporarily and to try again later.... So i go ahead and try resetting by sending a reset request to the recovery email. Did so till i saw that it said an email was sent to "s******@icloud.com".... argh!!! Seems my brother used the email he created for my mother as the recovery email. That or he doesn't remember which email he used.

At this point i'm fairly frustrated with not only my whole family but apple as well. Call my brother back up to see if he has a receipt for the iPad. No he doesn't. So i asked him where he got it from. He says he bought it from a friend. So now what am I doing with this iPad? Is it just a nice expensive paper weight? What are my options to resolve this. Keep in mind also that the email associated with the iPad is pretty much the same one associated with her iphone. Except that the first and last name is switched. Will this help me in anyway with apple if I bring this to a Genuis Bar?

Signed...

Extremely Frustrated Son.