A detective has been assigned to investigate money missing from Kanawha County Magistrate Court.
An official in magistrate court alerted deputies to the missing money Wednesday, according to Mike Rutherford, chief deputy for the Kanawha County Sheriff's Office.
"We are just getting into it," Rutherford said Thursday about the investigation. "We do know the money is not where it should be."
Each day, magistrate court employees deposit money collected from fines, among other court costs.
"My understanding is that it was supposed to have been deposited at the end of the day and it wasn't. The next morning when another individual looked for it, it wasn't there," Rutherford said. "Nobody seems to know really what happened to it right now."
Rutherford wouldn't disclose the names of any employees who have been interviewed. He also didn't want to say how much is missing.
"It was a reasonable sum, but not a huge amount," Rutherford said. "But on the other hand, we don't know where the investigation will lead. We may find out there's been additional monies taken that we don't know about that have been taken over a period of time. We have no reason to believe that at the present time, but it's something we may end up looking into."
Deputies are interviewing employees and magistrates who work in the office, according to Rutherford. He said detectives will try to figure out where the money was last seen.
"The officer is trying to talk to them and trying to follow the trail of where the money was last seen, who had access to it and that type of thing."
Reach Kate White at
kate.white@wvgazettemail.com,
304-348-1723 or follow
@KateLWhite on Twitter.