Defunct Firm’s Ex-Secretary Also Gets Probation : Embezzler Must Repay $31,000 to Employer

A Simi Valley woman who embezzled $31,000 from a Chatsworth research and development firm while she was the company’s sole employee was sentenced Thursday to five years’ probation and ordered to pay back the money.

Linda A. Park, 46, wept softly as San Fernando Superior Court Judge John H. Major chastised her for “violating the trust” of Quantatec President Robert Young, who hired Park to be the firm’s secretary-treasurer shortly after he started the business in 1980. The primary project for Quantatec, which Young said went out of business because of Park’s embezzling, was creating calibration devices for a space telescope.

Park, who had no criminal record, was in charge of all the company’s financial records when she wrote more than 100 checks to herself from November, 1981, to October, 1984, court records showed.

Guilty Plea

She pleaded guilty in August to one count of grand theft.

In a letter to the court, Park asked Major not to send her to jail so that she could keep her new job at a Canoga Park company and repay the stolen money to Young.

Under a plea bargain, Major could have sentenced the mother of three to as much as a year in County Jail. But Deputy Dist. Atty. Vickye Mitchell told Major it would be better to give Park an opportunity to make restitution.

The maximum sentence for grand theft is three years in state prison, Mitchell said.

Park said in the letter that she began “borrowing” from Quantatec’s two checking accounts to pay family bills.

“I tried to always pay it back in the beginning, but it got to a point when I could no longer pay back the money I took,” Park wrote. “I owed money and kept trying to find some way to pay it back while getting further and further into debt. I had never done anything like this before, nor since then.”

Routine Audit

Young said after Park’s sentencing that the thefts were discovered during a routine audit as part of Quantatec’s application for a large government grant. Park had destroyed Quantatec’s canceled checks and took most of the financial records with her when she left the company last year, Young said.

“It took $10,000 just to reconstruct the books, and several thousand dollars in tax penalties,” Young said. “I’d say that $30,000 in stolen money translated into a $50,000 loss for the company and pretty much did it in.”

Young, who now works at Rocketdyne, told Major that he did not want Park to go to jail.

Major told Park that, if she violates the terms of her probation, which include an order that she not write any checks, she could be sent to County Jail for a year. A second violation would mean three years in state prison, he said.