A Cedar Lake woman got 15 months in federal prison on May 28 after she admitted stealing $107,000 from two Hanover elementary school PTO funds.
Authorities allege she also actively hampered the police investigation.
Katie Tristan, 41, pleaded guilty in October in the U.S. District Court in Hammond to bank fraud. After prison, she will serve two years on supervised release.
The theft occurred between October 2020 and June 2023. She has already paid the $125,000 in court-ordered restitution, which will be repaid almost entirely to the Hanover Community School Corp., filings show.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Zachary Heater wrote Tristan used her role as president of two PTOs to cut out other volunteers who could have kept an eye on the money meant for extracurricular activities.
She used $70,000 for “long-term car rentals,” he said. She also spent the money on travel, hotels, sports tickets, utility bills, streaming subscriptions, online shopping and other uses.
Her defense lawyer Alison Benjamin wrote Tristan was essentially a stay-at-home mom of three children who faced personal difficulties during a “particularly turbulent time” after the COVID-19 shutdowns. She needed “to project self-confidence” by taking the money.
The lawyer wrote “poor oversight” gave her the chance.
Court filings show by summer 2022, the money ran dry, forcing her to use various schemes to inflate the bank account balance and hide her theft. By mid-2023, vendors contacted the school district when they weren’t getting paid.
At first, Tristan lied and said there was enough money, then implied other volunteers could be responsible, Heater wrote. She then forwarded “a steady stream of forged checks and bank documents” to make it seem like the PTO was paying its bills.
She gave the same fake documentation to police, Heater wrote.
“When school administrators and the Cedar Lake Police Department began investigating the missing PTO funds, Tristan obstructed those investigations by forging bank documents and using fake email accounts to impersonate other PTO volunteers,” according to a release. “In September 2023, Tristan used a fake email account to impersonate the Cedar Lake Police detective handling the investigation, enabling her to manipulate the detective’s communications with a key witness.”
“By stealing from her parent-teacher organization, Katie Tristan stole from the children that she had supposedly volunteered to help,” U.S. Attorney Adam Mildred said in a release.
The FBI and Cedar Lake Police investigated.
Hanover Superintendent Mary MacAulay told parents in an October 2023 letter that administrators believed at least $37,500 was stolen from the Jane Ball and Red Cedars Elementary PTOs, which are financially separate from the school district. She added then that both would be “dissolved” and reformed with greater financial oversight.
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