2012: The year that Lori McVicar plans to fully repay the Rod Kelley Parents’ Club, more than a decade after she embezzled $54,000 from the group’s coffers as treasurer, forging checks to the club for herself.
Gilroy – 2012: The year that Lori McVicar plans to fully repay the Rod Kelley Parents’ Club, more than a decade after she embezzled $54,000 from the group’s coffers as treasurer, forging checks to the club for herself.
McVicar has five years to pay the roughly $23,000 she still owes to the elementary school club under a payment plan approved Friday by Superior Court Judge Edward Lee. The Gilroy woman had repaid less than half of the pilfered funds by March, when her probation was due to end. McVicar was convicted of grand theft and forgery in 2002, after fellow club members unraveled her crime.
Over the past four months, as prosecutors urged Judge Lee to punish her, McVicar voluntarily repaid more than $10,000 of her debt and pleaded for another chance to make right, citing illness, her father’s death and a rough divorce as reasons she couldn’t pay. Most of the $10,000 flowed from a civil settlement after her father’s death, McVicar said.
“I couldn’t pay what I didn’t have,” she said, later adding, “I lost my job [as a medical assistant] due to the news coverage associated with this case … I’m on disability until October, welfare, food stamps … As soon as [employers] see I have a felony, they won’t hire me.”
McVicar proposed a five-year plan of steadily higher payments, starting with $100 this September, to $280 next September. Under the plan, the club would be fully repaid by August 2012, Judge Lee calculated. McVicar also asked to be credited for a $3,000 payment that she says never appeared on her balance; Lee said the issue could be sorted out as McVicar’s debt diminished.
“She is anxious to make the victims whole in this case,” said public defender Thompson Sharkey. “… She asks the court for mercy.”
Deputy district attorney Jennifer Deng didn’t insist on prison time for McVicar, as other prosecutors had done earlier. Doing so would only delay restitution for the club, Deng said. Instead, she asked the court to require significantly higher payments of $500 a month from McVicar, who balked at that figure. Former club member Laura Case, who attended Friday’s sentencing with two of her children, echoed Deng’s words.
“More than anything, we just want the money back,” Case told Judge Lee, citing the club’s needs for larger sums to make big purchases. “We’ve been frustrated with this whole process … We just want this to be over with.”
Judge Lee approved McVicar’s plan of $100 to $280 payments, extending her probation to Aug. 23, 2012. No one is pleased with the situation, he said, but the plan should refill the club’s accounts, while allowing McVicar to rebuild her life. Lee added that he believed McVicar’s descriptions of her financial status, which were in question last month as a district attorney’s investigator combed through her assets and expenses.
“If I thought you had a secret bank account, I’d be cheerfully sending you to prison,” Lee said.
Despite prosecutors’ earlier assertion to the contrary, McVicar will not pay interest on the outstanding debt, said Lee. Court records reveal Judge Lee never ordered interest, he said, though paying interest would be a typical provision of such a sentence. If counted, the interest would add nearly $20,000 to her unpaid balance.
“I probably forgot, to be honest,” he explained.
The sentence concluded months of tense hearings over McVicar’s fate – hearings that have revived bitterness and frustration over her original crime. Club members say the theft undermined the club’s fund-raising efforts, and overshadows its work to this day. No one – not Lee, not McVicar, not club members – was happy to be in court Friday, and Judge Lee said he hoped this was the last wrinkle in the case. He plans to retire in 2012 – the same year McVicar’s probation will end.
“I’d like this case to be over with,” he said, “when I retire.”
