Photo: Stock Image
Written By: Robert L. McCullough
Ventura County, Ca. December 13, 2022 – The impact of the nation’s current inflationary economics may be influencing the ability of some folks to abide by moral, ethical, and legal standards in their professional lives to the point where they wind up in handcuffs. That appears to be the case for an employee at a neighborhood Chevron Gas Station who has been charged with embezzlement theft.
According to Ventura County Sheriff’s Department spokesman Det. Sgt. Will Hollowell, that’s what appears to have been the case in the December 12th arrest of 48-year-old Santa Paula resident Lupe Cecile Deluca Mims. Mims—working as a cashier in the service station’s convenience store—fell under the suspicious gaze of managers when they “discovered various amounts of cash had been unaccounted for” throughout the preceding months.
Those “various amounts” totaled slightly more than $12,000, a sum well beyond the occasional petty cash error and significant enough to compel a report to the Fillmore Police Department. With the use of video surveillance, officers attached to the Fillmore Detective Bureau determined that Mims pulled off her caper by “falsifying money drops” in the store safe, while “pocketing the money herself.”
Mims was contacted at the store on the morning of December 12th and was taken into custody. She was transported to the Ventura County Jail, where she was booked on charges of embezzlement, and remains in custody with her bail set at $20,000.
