Boss rejects payments, says worker stole money
A Cedar Grove woman who admitted stealing more than $30,000 from her employer said she would pay it back, authorities said.
Bay County Sheriff’s investigators said Marisol Monroe-Garcia, 43, of 2511 Cedar Lane, used the money she stole from a hair salon to buy a car, go on a cruise and play bingo. Deputies charged her with grand theft of more than $30,000. She was arrested Thursday and released Friday on pretrial release.
According to an incident report from the Bay County Sheriff’s Office, Monroe-Garcia was the manager of Cuts By Us on Tyndall Parkway in Callaway. She stole money from the business between October and December 2007, Deputy Luther Burnham said in a Sheriff’s Office incident report. The incident report said Monroe-Garcia “rolled the money,” basically stealing a deposit and then replacing it with a later deposit.
When her boss confronted her, Monroe-Garcia wrote a confession and said she would pay the money back with monthly installments of $500 and give up her vacation pay for 2008, according to the report. But instead of agreeing to the payments, the owner called the Sheriff’s Office.
Monroe-Garcia told deputies on Thursday that she had been stealing and then paying back money from her employer since 2006. However, she said that in the last three months, she fell behind in paying the money back and had taken a second job to try to catch up.
She fell behind when she used $15,000 to pay for her great niece’s funeral, and when her car “blew up,” she bought a 2006 Mustang, the report states. However, investigators said she went on a cruise in the summer of 2007 and never paid the funeral home anything.
Burnham’s report said several local businesses donated money to help pay for the funeral, and the funeral home never received a payment from the family. The funeral home wrote off $2,000 of the cost of the funeral, which was about $5,070.
Burnham noted that Monroe-Garcia made $42,000 a year at Cuts By Us. The woman told deputies she does not have an addiction or gambling problem, the reports said.
“Monroe-Garcia said she does like to play bingo, but so does everyone in Bay County,” Burnham wrote.