A former accounting assistant at the $104 million Pinal County Federal Credit Union in Casa Grande, Ariz., who confessed last year to stealing almost $800,000, was recently sentenced in federal court to one year in prison and ordered to pay $555,571 in restitution and $200 in court assessment fees, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office.
As part of a plea agreement, Jennelle Rena Curtis pleaded guilty last summer to a two -count criminal information charging her with embezzlement.
In her plea agreement, Curtis confessed that she issued about 100 PCFCU checks totaling at least $780,697 for her personal use from 2008 to 2011, including two checks totaling about $226,400 that were deposited into a bank account belonging to her mother, Janet Long.
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Curtis was ordered to pay $555,571 to Cumis Insurance Society, which covers PCFCU, and to self-surrender by July 7, 2014, to the Bureau of Prisons or U.S. Marshal's Office, the sentencing document said.
The court documents do not explain what happened with the additional $225,000 mentioned in her 2013 plea agreement.
When Curtis was arrested last year, local media reported that she had worked a decade at the credit union and was a mother of four young children whose 23-year-old husband was shot and killed at a truck stop in March.
According to an Aug. 1, 2012 article in the Phoenix New Times, her parents, Howard and Janet Long, claimed that about $200,000 of the money Curtis took from the credit union was rightfully theirs because Janet Long had given her daughter about $200,000 from a 401k account and asked her to put it into a different account.
After her release from prison, Curtis will be on supervised probation for a period of five years.
Her plea agreement called for the prosecutor to recommend a sentence of between 24 and 30 months in prison, but did not preclude the defendant from seeking a shorter sentence.
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