Attorneys representing one of the lunch ladies accused of stealing nearly $500,000 in cash from New Canaan school cafeterias entered a not guilty plea Tuesday.
Marie Wilson appeared in state Superior Court in Stamford before Judge John Blawie. Her sister, Joanne Pascarelli, who also had been arrested by New Canaan Police in August and already pleaded not guilty to a first-degree larceny charge, was in the courtroom.
Senior Assistant State’s Attorney Joseph Valdes said during the hearing that Wilson’s attorney, Christine Landis of The Law Offices of Mark Sherman Law, had just been given a “CD with bank records retrieved by police, subject to search warrants, and she needs time to review them.”
Wilson’s case was continued to Jan. 11.
A Wilton resident, she had been employed as the assistant food director at New Canaan High School. Pascarelli, of Norwalk, had overseen the food services program at Saxe.
According to information gleaned from arrest warrant applications, the sisters used a similar method to steal money at each school: First, they allowed and in some cases, food service workers say, advised the women stationed at cash registers to take in cash without recording the transactions in the registers, then removed large bills from registers themselves, “counting out” the drawers at the end of the day and reporting a small deposit of what remained.
District officials have said an outside accountant is examining records to determine whether parents with charge accounts additionally were overcharged.
During an interview after the court appearance, attorney Mark Sherman said Wilson is “anxious to resolve this.”
“So we will continue to work within the system to resolve this as quickly as possible,” he said.
Asked about the bank records that were supplied to Wilson’s legal team, Sherman said they likely related to his client’s own banking.
Police had “executed a search warrant for those bank records and then provided them to us,” he said.
Pascarelli is scheduled to appear Thursday.