Sheridan Woman Sentenced

Katherine Anne West of Sheridan was sentenced in December to more than five years in federal prison for embezzling nearly $700,000 from her former employer, Lift Truck Service Center Inc., between 2001 and 2006.

West had pleaded guilty in June to two of the 152 counts with which she was originally charged back in April 2009, but she tried to withdraw that guilty plea earlier this month.

“West asserts, and would so testify at a hearing on this motion, that she entered the plea of guilty because she felt that her health would suffer adversely from a trial and, as a result of her physical symptoms and worry about a trial, decided to plead guilty and forego her defense that she was authorized to take the money at issue,” her lawyer, Jeff Rosenzweig of Little Rock, wrote in a motion to withdraw her plea.

U.S. District Judge William R. Wilson Jr. rejected her request to take back her plea. He sentenced her to 64 months in prison, commencing Jan. 24, and ordered her to repay $698,836.06. Her prison sentence will be followed by five years of supervised release.

According to the original indictment, West, an accounting clerk, used her employer’s money and checks to pay almost $163,000 of her own bills, and she issued company checks totaling $536,000 to fictitious businesses and deposited them into an account she opened in the name of P&K Enterprises.