Gambling Nun Gets One Year in Prison for Stealing $835k from L.A. Elementary School

A nun with a habit for gaming that led to the embezzlement of at to the lowest degree $835,000 from a Golden State uncomplicated schooltime was sentenced to ace year’s internment Monday.

Sister Blessed Virgin Margaret Kreuper, 80, admitted stealing the money from St King James Catholic School inwards the L.A. suburbia of Torrance, where she was school day principal sum for nearly 30 years.

Despite taking a vow of poverty when she joined her order, the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet, Kreuper blew thousands of dollars on play trips to Las Vegas and Lake Tahoe.

The money was misappropriated o'er a full stop of decade years and should experience gone to improving facilities at the hard-up school.

An intragroup scrutinize blew the lid turned the racquet inwards June 2018, simply as Kreuper was near to retire.

She confessed to an ex-FBI investigator, hired past the Archdiocese of Los Angeles to grille staff almost the missing money.

Absolved past Archdiocese

But parents at the school day were upwards in arms when Kreuper was initially exculpated of her sins. The archdiocese decided non to act on outlaw charges because she had “expressed remorse.”

In December 2018, parents told The Daily Breeze that a repose person accused of the same offense would follow looking for at a hefty prison sentence. The parents went to the police force as a complaining party.

In her defense, lawyers for Kreuper argued she “accepted full responsibility for what she had done” when confronted past the archdiocese.

But prosecutors disagreed. They said she had tried to warrant her actions by saying priests were break paid than nuns and she deserved a raise.

She also directed schooling employees to castrate and destroy financial records while the incriminating scrutinize was inward process.

The regime asked for II years imprisonment.

Some Parents Wanted Harsher Sentence

The L.A. Times reports that some parents were willing to forgive and forget. But others wanted the royal court to mete come out the replete(p) thrust of the law, a 20-year sentence.

One couple, Phil and Debby Rhilebinger, complained they had lived on a shoestring patch paying for their quintet children to attend the school. Kreuper stole at least $45,000 from their payments.

At a plea hearing cobbler's last year, US District Judge genus Otis D. Fanny Wright II made the sinful financial statement that he did non “look on nuns as ordinary people,” because he was raised a Catholic and enlightened in convent schools.

Prosecutors responded with a memorandum to the jurist quoting a 12-year-old pupil who had written that Kreuper was “just similar any other robber.”