Former La Quinta Soccer Commissioner Pleads Guilty To Embezzlement

A former La Quinta American Youth Soccer Organization commissioner pleaded guilty today to embezzling more than $100,000 from the organization and also admitted using a friend’s name to fraudulently obtain checks on a credit card account.

Sharon Schumaier ws immediately sentenced to a two-year state prison term by Riverside County Superior Court Judge Thomas Douglass, who also ordered the 42-year-old defendant to pay $113,000 in restitution to the La Quinta AYSO.

As part of the plea, 39 felony counts of embezzlement were dismissed, which Deputy District Attorney Earl Roberts called a “fair” resolution of the case.

“Mrs. Schumaier has received an appropriate sentence for her actions, and, hopefully, everyone she betrayed can now begin to move on,” Roberts said. “It will be a long road, but everyone involved can take some solace in the fact that Mrs. Schumaier is behind bars in state prison where she belongs.”

Schumaier, a former commissioner for the group, was asked to leave AYSO in June 2009 for failing to provide financial records.

She wrote checks from the AYSO’s bank account to her husband and their company, Desert Cities Automotive in Indio, over a two-year period, according to a declaration in support of an arrest warrant.

Investigator Brad Farwell, who prepared the declaration, said Schumaier lied on her application to AYSO about two previous convictions in Los Angeles and Orange counties.

Schumaier pleaded guilty to grand theft of personal property and money laundering in Orange County Superior Court in January 1996. She was convicted of forgery in Los Angeles County in July 1997.

“I believe Sharon purposely hid the fact she had been convicted of money laundering, and upon being put in a position allowing access to money, she used that position to embezzle approximately $113,043,” Farwell wrote.

She wrote the checks to her company without approval from AYSO, according to Farwell. A co-signer on at least 11 of the fraudulent checks told investigators that the signatures were not his and he had no knowledge of the checks, Farwell said.

The identity theft case stems from earlier this year, when an acquaintance of Schumaier contacted Indio detectives to allege that she had taken financial documents from a home without permission in May, according to Ben Guitron of the Indio Police Department.

Schumaier tried to forge documents in an attempt to transfer funds into her account, Guitron said.