McCaffrey’s employee fund raided, then replaced
Two recent news stories caught my attention over the past couple days.
One, from last Friday’s paper, detailed the theft of $42,000 from the fund to benefit McCaffrey’s store employees. The fund was originally earmarked to help store employees with health insurance costs during the time their jobs were displaced while the local supermarket was rebuilding from a fire.
The store re-opened this past April (a story I addressed in a this May post), and discussions have been ongoing about what to do with the remaining funds from the $277,000 that had been donated by community members and the store’s owner. Then this happened.
Of course, I was away from the local area and not really paying attention when the follow up story appeared in Saturday’s paper. Apparently, the bank in which the fund was being held has decided to replace the $42,000 in the fund while it takes part in the investigation to recover the missing money. Apparently this theft was a case of someone writing fraudulent checks to a phantom business in Maryland.
The investigation is ongoing, and it is reprehensible that someone would carry out a plot to steal from a charitable fund, but I’m glad to see a horrible situation like this has been remedied so quickly—now, if we could only ensure a special mode of punishment for people who would actually plot to steal money from charity like this.
