A St. George woman has been charged with attempted prison escape after she requested a furlough to go to a funeral for her father, who in fact hadn't died.
Joy Lynn Snyder, 24, was in the Utah State Prison women's facility, where she was to receive a diagnostic evaluation based on a guilty plea to a charge of writing bad checks in southern Utah.On June 6, she telephoned her attorney and told him her father had died and she wanted to attend the funeral and viewing on June 9 and 10. The attorney contacted a judge and arranged a 72-hour furlough that would have started at noon June 9.
Corrections officials said Snyder told them her husband and brother-in-law would pick her up. But by 3 p.m., Snyder's relatives hadn't arrived and officials had discovered that her father was alive and well and living in Cedar City.
Snyder was charged Wednesday in 3rd Circuit Court with one count of attempted escape, a third-degree felony.
Ogden bookkeeper
faces theft sentenceAssociated Press
OGDEN - An Ogden bookkeeper faces sentencing in the theft of $190,000 over four years.
Susan Allred, 35, pleaded guilty last month to three of four second-degree felony theft charges. The fourth was dropped as part of a plea bargain. She faces sentencing June 24 before 2nd District Judge David E. Roth.
She has signed a plea agreement to pay restitution of $100,000 to Model Linen Supply, the Ogden company where she was fired last August after police were notifiied.
"Realistically, if it's $100,000 or $120,000 we don't expect to see it," Bud Tolliver, owner of Model Linen, said of the restitution order.
"When you're in business you spend all your time trying to make money and not that much on protecting yourself from employees," he said.
Tolliver said he was startled to find Allred had - in the time she worked for him - made a down payment on a house, remodeled and recarpeted it, put in a swimming pool, bought a new car and eaten in expensive restaurants "every night. On $8 an hour."
"The total loss to the company was in the area of $190,000," said Rob Carpenter, investigator with the Weber County attorney's office who shared the case with Ogden Police Detective Randy Lythgoe.
Efforts were unsuccessful to contact Allred or her attorney for comment.
The company was hindered by the thefts "but it really hurt the other employees," Tolliver said. "Raises have been damn hard to come by here in the last few years, for obvious reasons now."
She took only cash, Tolliver and the detectives said, taking sums from delivery drivers' collections. She covered those amounts by inflating discounts given customers and adjusting other accounts such as those to pay utilities, they said.
A former bookkeeper filling in for Allred while she was on vacation uncovered the discrepancies, authorities said.