Former local school official sentenced to prison for grand theft
- Elizabeth Larson
- Posted On
LAKEPORT, Calif. – A former local educator who last year was convicted of identity theft in cases involving his adult children was this week sentenced to prison time for grand theft from a Lake County couple.
George Tanner McQueen II, 62, of Sacramento was sentenced to three years for grand theft plus a two-year bail enhance on Monday, according to Deputy District Attorney Rachel Abelson.
Abelson said McQueen will serve the prison sentence in the Lake County Jail.
She said McQueen had pleaded either guilty or no contest to grand theft and one enhancement as a result of him being on bail or involved in another felony case at the time of this latest crime.
In McQueen’s latest case, when he committed the grand theft he was in the midst of the identity theft case involving his son and daughter, for which he was sentenced to jail time in Placer and Sacramento counties last year, as Lake County News has reported.
McQueen’s attorney, Eric H. Hintz, of Sacramento, told Lake County News he had no comment on the latest case outcome.
McQueen, a former Yuba College dean who at one time had worked for the Lake County Office of Education, also has a former criminal conviction locally stemming from a 2005 elder abuse case in which he stole funds from the estate of a friend for whom he was acting as executor.
In the years since that conviction – for which McQueen was sentenced to a year in jail and required to to pay $185,000 in restitution – he had moved to the Sacramento area where he opened a business, McQueen and Associates, which offered services including bookkeeping, payroll and tax preparation.
In this latest Lake County case, which was filed in February, a local couple that owns a business and had used McQueen as their accountant for 25 years found that he had transferred $103,000 from their accounts – $60,000 from personal accounts and $43,000 from a business account into his own account over the course of several days in August 2017, according to case documents compiled last year.
McQueen told the couple it was a mistake and claimed to a sheriff’s detective that it was a “glitch,” however, despite his promises to the couple to return the funds, the money didn’t reappear in their accounts.
The victims had reported discovering the missing funds weeks before McQueen’s September 2017 sentencings in the identity theft cases involving his children, in which he had taken out more than a dozen credit cards in their names and run up bills totaling an estimated $125,000.
In a plea agreement reached in the current Lake County case, Abelson said another enhancement for McQueen being on bail for a criminal case was dismissed.
She said the male victim in the case read his impact statement in open court on Monday.
The court denied mandatory supervision and home detention for McQueen, and reserved restitution for the victims, Abelson said.
The District Attorney’s Office said McQueen is set to return to court for a restitution hearing at 8:15 a.m. Feb. 27 in Department 4.
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