PORTLAND, Ore. (KOIN) — The former loss prevention manager who stole nearly $230,000 from self-checkout machines at Fred Meyer was sentenced to prison on Thursday.
Thirty-seven-year-old Emily Tallman received a 4-year prison sentence and was ordered to repay $229,714 in restitution she stole between Jan. 25 and June 21, 2017.
“This was not an isolated event,” Multnomah County Deputy District Attorney Sean Hughey said. “It was an absolute betrayal of trust.”
A jury convicted Tallman of 14 counts of 1st-degree theft and seven counts of 1st-degree aggravated theft in March.
The investigation started in early 2017 when the Gateway Fred Meyer store realized it was losing large sums of money from its self-checkout machines. Tallman told the company she couldn’t figure out why the machines were short, however, they eventually realized it was her.
When officials watched the video for May 24, 2017, they saw Tallman pushing a grocery cart at 1:30 a.m. next to the self-checkout machines. The grocery cart was full of cleaning supplies. Tallman was “looking around the store, apparently, to see if anyone can see her, then opening the secure cash storage area inside the machine with a key, then reaching inside the machine with her hand,” according to court documents.
The video shows her removing something from the machine but the contents were obscured by her clipboard.
When the theft happened on May 24, Tallman was not scheduled to be inside the store.
Video and records from the self-checkout machines show that Tallman stole more than $18,000 from 3 machines on May 24, according to court documents.
When detectives arrested Tallman on June 22 at Gateway Fred Meyer police searched her backpack and found methamphetamine inside an eyeglass case, according to court documents.