Four indicted in school copier contract case
By Karen Gleason
Del Rio News-Herald
Published October 31, 2008
District Attorney Fred Hernandez announced Thursday that the last defendants have been arrested on the indictments returned by the 63rd grand jury on Aug. 27, 2008, ending the long investigation into legal improprieties in the actions of administrators for San Felipe/Del Rio Consolidated Independent School District in dealing with Lone Star Copiers and school equipment obtained from Xerox.
The charges arose from three interrelated types of activities.
The first concerned misrepresentations by Marjorie P. Thetford, the former risk management supervisor of the SFDRCISD; Mathew J. Stavely, owner of Lone Star Copiers; and Gilbert Gene Ayala, also of Lone Star Copiers; to the SFDRCISD board on or about December 16, 2002.
They allegedly represented that a new equipment contract being presented to the board as being a government version of the contract when in fact it was not the government version and represented that certain payments would not apply to the SFDRCISD when in fact they did.
The contract resulted in the school district being over-billed more than $1 million.
Thetford, Stavely and Ayala were indicted for securing execution of a document by deception, which because of the amount of loss to the district, is a first degree felony which carries a range of punishment of five (5) to ninety nine (99) years in prison and a fine up to $10,000.
Keith Sutherland, the chief financial officer of SFDRCISD, was indicted for misapplication of funds by a fiduciary, for recklessly failing to secure the state contract rate for twenty-two copiers at a loss to the school district of $200,000 or more.
The second type of illegal activity involved the March 2003 removal and disposal of tens of thousands of dollars worth of the school district’s copiers.
Stavely was indicted for the theft of copiers with a value between $20,000 and $100,000, a third degree felony. Thetford was charged with theft by a public servant, over $200,000, in connection with those same copiers, which because of her public servant status is a first-degree felony.
The third category of illegal activity was the May, 2003 conversion by Thetford and Stavely of Xerox printers belonging to SFDRCISD which had a value between $20,000 and $100,000. Again, Stavely was indicted for third-degree theft and Thetford for first-degree theft by a public servant.
District Attorney Fred Hernandez headed the joint effort which included local investigators from the Val Verde County Sheriff’s Office and Texas Rangers, as well as investigators Krista Steele and Blythe Valenzuela from the State Auditor’s Office Special Investigations Unit in Austin, and John Weber, former head of the Special Investigations Unit of the State Auditor’s Office.
“This investigation could not have been carried out without the assistance of John Keel and Pamela Munn of the State Auditor’s Office. The complex investigation stretched over a period of three years and required grand jury subpoenas from four different grand juries to gather the thousands of pages of documents and the witness statements necessary to complete the investigation,” Hernandez said.
The last of the defendants were arrested on October 29, 2008.
All four defendants will have to appear before District Judge, Tom Lee, who will arraign them and set the cases for trial.
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