Mitigation hearing set in embezzlement case involving employee of auto body company

Laura Matus had been scheduled to be sentenced Wednesday

A Superior Court Judge on Wednesday granted a request for a mitigation hearing by the attorney representing a woman who embezzled hundreds of thousands of dollars from a well-known local auto body company after one of the victims in the case urged him to impose the longest jail term allowed.

Linda Rautenberg, who is the wife of Warren Rautenberg, the owner of Dicks Auto Rebuilders, spoke at what was to be a sentencing hearing for Laura Matus in Yuma County Superior Court, saying the fraudulent acts she committed over the years nearly caused the company to go out of business.

“Miss Matus needs to think about what she has done from a prison cell, not from the comfort of her home,” Rautenberg said in asking for a year-long jail sentence.

Attorney Richard Edgar, who represents Matus, asked for the mitigation hearing after being informed of the sentence the court intended to impose on his client.

Superior Court Judge Haws said it was the court’s intention to follow the terms of Matus’ plea agreement and sentence her to 60 months of supervised probation and order that she pay $346,000 in restitution to Dicks Auto Rebuilders, located at 201 W. 24th St., where she had worked for 34 years as the office manager before being fired.

As a condition of that probation, Judge Haws also stated that he was going to sentence her to 90 days in jail.

Edgar responded by saying his client was ready to proceed to sentencing, however, she was requesting to self-surrender to the Yuma County jail in 30 days.

Matus pleaded guilty on May 15 to one count of theft as part of a plea agreement with prosecutors. In doing so, she had to admit that from Jan. 2015 through Dec. 17, 2018, she embezzled more than $100,000 from the company by writing checks to herself and making unauthorized cash withdrawls.

When given the opportunity to address the court as a victim, Rautenberg said she was not in favor of the plea deal, telling the judge that an ongoing audit of the company’s accounts revealed that, from 2016 and 2017, Matus had been using the company’s business account to make payments on her own credit card, write checks to family members, and buy groceries.

She added that while employed at Dicks, the company paid Matus’ cellphone bill and the dry cleaning of her work attire, in addition to her salary, which equated to approximately $30 an hour. She was also given a leased vehicle to drive.

“I’m embarrassed to admit we treated her like family,” Rautenberg said.

In continuing with her testimony Rautenberg explained that her husband, who is now 84-years-old, had given control over their business’ bookkeeping, payroll, tax preparation and tax deposits to Matus. She added that in all of those years her husband never checked into the management of those accounts.

Matus also had failed to pay taxes for six years and hid the notices, which caused the Rautenbergs to have to sell a Lamborghini sports car and several acres of land to pay back taxes and employee wages to keep the company open.

After hearing Rautenberg’s testimony, Judge Haws explained to Edgar that he now knows more about the circumstances of the crime than when his client had entered the plea agreement and he was inclined to impose a lengthier jail sentence than the 90 days he had planned to give.

He then granted Edgar’s request for a mitigation hearing and scheduled it for 9:30 a.m. on Aug. 6, with sentencing set to follow.

When Matus was interviewed May 10, she told Yuma police that she had been fired for “taping into the tills.” She also stated that in addition to her weekly salary, she had other verbal agreements with the company’s owner that no one else knew about, police said.

She continued by saying that the owner of the company had promised it to her, so she believed that it would be hers one day. She, at one point, also told investigators that she had endured many years of verbal abuse from the Rautenbergs and that it had caused her self-esteem to plummet.

She was arrested after the interview and booked into Yuma County jail.

James Gilbert can be reached at jgilbert@yumasun. com or 539-6854. Find him on Facebook at www. Facebook.com/YSJamesGilbert or on Twitter @ YSJamesGilbert.