Recovered funds finally distributed

ELYRIA — After more than a decade of languishing in a bank account, money received by the city as partial reimbursement in the case of an Elyria police officer who stole from the Police Department’s evidence room is finally being distributed.

The $63,527.95 will be split, with 60 percent going to the Lorain County Drug Task Force and the rest going into a law enforcement trust account administered by county Prosecutor Dennis Will’s office.

The money, city officials said, largely comes from an insurance settlement that was paid out in 2000, three years after former Elyria police Officer John Payne was convicted in 1997 of stealing more than $140,000.

City Auditor Ted Pileski said that Payne, who served time in prison after pleading guilty in the case, drained his public retirement account of $35,000 to make a partial payment on the restitution ordered in the case and another $55,000 came from the insurance settlement.

In the early 2000s, Pileski said, $27,016 was distributed to other agencies, although because of how long ago that was and the inaccessibility of some paperwork, he couldn’t say exactly which law enforcement agencies got that money. The rest remained in an account gathering interest.

Will said the documentation he’s seen indicates the insurance settlement was only $22,000 and he wasn’t aware of money being taken out of the account in the early 2000s, but he added that figuring out exactly what happened proved difficult because of the age of the case and some federal court records that couldn’t be located.

Pileski said the money essentially had been waiting for someone to figure out what to do with it, but no one did anything until this year.

Assistant Elyria Law Director Amanda Deery said once city officials realized the money was simply sitting in the account, it became a question of who should get it.

“For a variety of reasons that money was never divvied up,” she said. “It was being held in escrow.”

Elyria Police Chief Duane Whitely said his department already has received its share of the money that Payne paid toward restitution and couldn’t keep the rest.

“Would I have liked to have kept it? Sure, but it wasn’t ours to keep,” he said. “In my opinion it was something that should have been taken care of years ago.”

If Pileski’s figures are correct, the total amount of restitution that the city and law enforcement agencies received in restitution totaled only $90,000, about $50,000 less than Payne was ordered to repay.

The court record shows there was a brief attempt by the city to have Payne held in contempt of court for not paying the remainder in 1999, but that effort was scrapped the same year because the city was fighting with its insurance carrier over how much that company would have to pay.

Will said because of the time that’s passed, it’s unlikely the county or city would be able to go after Payne for what he still owes in restitution.

“No, I don’t believe you can just arbitrarily try to go and get the rest of it because it should have been taken care of back then,” he said.

In the end, Will said, no single law enforcement agency is getting back everything Payne stole.

“Nobody’s being made whole,” he said.

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