Porter County Courts Report

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Updated: January 12, 2012 9:27PM

VALPARAISO

Stealing from client earns woman 2 years in prison

Porter County Deputy Prosecutor Cheryl Polarek asked for an 18-month sentence for the Muncie woman who pleaded guilty to stealing from a 96-year-old Valparaiso woman, but Amanda Summers, 21, instead got two years.

“To steal treasured items from a 96-year-old woman is conduct I can only describe as loathsome. It takes a particular depravity of character to steal something an elderly woman has as keepsakes (of her husband),” Porter County Superior Court Judge Mary Harper said before sentencing Summers.

Summers stole $9,150 in forged checks and jewelry – some of which was pawned and melted down – from the woman while working for an in-home care company in November and December 2009.

She apparently also stole rings from another client and used a relative’s credit card without permission.

Harper noted that Summers first entered the legal system at age 12 and in 2009 was on bond for a conversion charge when she committed the Class D felony theft she pleaded to in Porter County.

Summers, who had two adult convictions for conversion by Thursday, was scheduled for sentencing on Dec. 13 but had her fiancée call her public defender and say she was hospitalized.

She later admitted she only wanted to spend Christmas with her infant daughter, although Marion County police took her into custody Dec. 22.

Harper said during the sentencing that although incarceration would be a hardship to Summers’s daughter, she wasn’t sure how much of a hardship it would be with a mother who refused to take medication or therapy for conduct disorders and admitted to using illegal drugs.

Summers could have received a three-year sentence for the crime she pleaded to.

Drug money in car earns Michigan woman 6 months’ jail

The 26-year-old Grand Rapids, Mich. mother who drove $265,800 of drug money through Northwest Indiana received a six-month sentence to Porter County Jail.

“There’s something of a lesson here in not allowing yourself to be used by others,” Porter County Superior Court Judge Mary Harper said to Katherine Nereida Collazo-Santiago during Thursday’s sentencing hearing.

Collazo-Santiago had pleaded guilty to Class D felony money laundering, down from a Class C felony where she faced two to eight years in prison.

The woman had to serve a minimum mandatory time because of a 2007 conviction for transporting drugs.

The money police found during a May 16 traffic stop on Interstate 94 in Porter County was forfeited to the Lake County Sheriff’s Department, who received two-thirds of it for making the stop, and to the Porter County Prosecutor’s Office and Drug Task Force.