New Canaan Police on May 8 arrested a 49-year-old Bridgeport man accused of signing checks made out to a local nonprofit organization and depositing them into his personal bank account.
On Jan. 21, officers became aware of two checks belonging to the South Avenue Cottage that had been fraudulently deposited on Dec. 13. The two checks, one for $100 and the other for $200 were deposited by an employee of the Cottage (who resigned in early January), according to an arrest warrant application written by NCPD Officer Kelly Coughlin.
South Avenue Cottage provides housing and care for adults with developmental disabilities, and the two checks were written in response to an annual appeal starting in November 2024, according to the police affidavit, signed by a prosecuting attorney and state Superior Court judge.
The New Canaan Group Home, Inc. board president at the time of the appeal “located two checks lying on one of the office desks inside the cottage that had been opened and endorsed on the back,” Coughlin said in the affidavit. “She stated it was normally her responsibility to retrieve the checks…so no one else should have opened them.”
Upon later review, the board president recognized the signatures on the backs of the checks to be the initials of one of the cottage’s house managers. Coughlin said this worker was employed by STAR, Inc. and outsourced to work at the Cottage.
Local officers contacted Capital One to obtain bank information for the account into which the forged checks were deposited, Coughlin’s affidavit said. According to the affidavit, this revealed the two checks that had been deposited into the employee’s personal account.
Contact was made with the suspect in early February when he told authorities that he was handed the checks by the property manager of a neighboring facility and was told to “deposit the checks and use the money for [South Avenue Cottage] bills,” Coughlin said in the affidavit.
The suspect’s story was later discredited by multiple cottage workers, who stated that “his story does not accurately reflect what their policy or what STAR, Inc.’s policy is…,” the application said.
New Canaan Police took the suspect into custody on May 8 and charged him with two counts each of third-degree forgery and sixth-degree larceny. He was released after promising to appear May 20 in state Superior Court. According to Connecticut Judicial Branch records, the arrested man has pleaded not guilty. His lawyer is Norwalk-based Frank Bevilacqua.