Ex-Director of Library Faces
Criminal, Civil Theft Trials
The former director of the Homer Township Public Library District in Lockport, Illinois, faces separate criminal and civil trials in July on charges that she stole hundreds of thousands of dollars from the library in the 1990s, the Joliet Herald News reported June 6.
Regetta A. Meyers is scheduled for trial July 9 on criminal charges filed in 1999 that she had siphoned $157,324 from library-district coffers since July 1996. The district trustees allege in a civil suit filed last year that Meyers stole some $330,000 by writing and then endorsing more than 700 checks from the petty cash fund to the order of “cash,” according to court documents. That case is scheduled for trial July 16.
Meyers, who was library director for 17 years, resigned in September 1999.
Court documents include part of a transcript from an interview in which Meyers tells detectives that she had misappropriated funds for three or four years. “I think I just basically started . . . taking a few dollars here and there,” she is quoted as saying, as her family’s finances “grew more pressing on us.”
Posted June 11, 2001.
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