The day after his finance director was arrested amid allegations that she embezzled more than $700,000 over a five-year period, St. Johns County Sheriff David Shoar spoke with reporters and took responsibility for the scandal that he says has rocked his agency.
“I am the person in charge and I have learned through my years in the military and through my years as a cop that you don’t get to shirk responsibility,” he said Wednesday afternoon during a roughly 30-minute news conference in his office.
It’s the answer he said he would give if one of the reporters present asked him who was ultimately responsible or at fault for the situation that required him to ask investigators from the Polk County Sheriff’s Office to come in and look into the fraud allegations in his finance department late last week.
By Tuesday morning, the director of that department, Raye A. Brutnell, had turned herself in at the Flagler County jail after those investigators obtained an arrest warrant for her on more than 150 felony counts including defrauding a financial institution, grand theft in excess of $100,000, organized scheme to defraud in excess of $50,000.
The St. Johns County Sheriff’s Office terminated her employment the same day.
The warrant alleges that Brutnell, 47, set up four fictitious vendor accounts through which she funneled money to herself over five years and that she also had written other checks from a benevolence fund for money that ultimately went to pay for her father’s nursing home as well her mortgage and car payment.
Shoar offered little new information about the case, and reminded reporters that the investigation is continuing and still in its early stages.
“It’s a very difficult time for our agency,” he said as the conference got underway around 1 p.m.
He renewed praise for the two employees who came forward with their concerns, prompting the investigation, and he made assurances that authorities will be able to recover the missing funds but offered few details as to how that might happen.
He also said that he and his staff will be meeting with the independent auditors who have audited the agency in recent years in order to learn how the alleged crimes went on for the last five years and that so he and others can begin the work of putting in place safeguards to keep something similar from happening again.
And while Shoar at times expressed dismay, frustration and disappointment over the arrest of an employee that he said started at the agency in 1991 as a dispatcher and climbed to head of the finance department, he stressed that there would be remedies put in place and lessons learned.
“We are going to be better for it,” he said.