Jeremy’s on the 500 block of Main Street in Chehalis is under new ownership now.
By Sharyn L. Decker
Lewis County Sirens news reporter
CHEHALIS – A restaurant manager accused of pocketing hundreds of dollars per shift from her Chehalis workplace has pleaded not guilty to multiple charges of theft.
Mindy D. Nogues, 32, worked at Jeremy’s Farm to Table on Main Street from May into October of last year.
Owner Jeremy Wildhaber said he now he knows why he was experiencing such a cash crunch, for months.
“She was stealing $300 to $500 a day in September and October,” Wildhaber said on a recent day. “In October, she got us for $4,000.”
Altogether, he, his bookkeeper and police attribute more than $8,000 in losses to the now-former employee.
Nogues was arrested Jan. 19 in connection with a warrant issued on Dec. 31 and the following day allowed release on a $10,000 unsecured bond.
Lewis County prosecutors charged her with three counts of second-degree theft and 10 counts of identity theft.
Last week, she and her lawyer went before a judge in Lewis County Superior Court, where a request to postpone her trial was granted.
Lewis County Deputy Prosecutor Melissa Bohm said the trial was set for next month, but rescheduled to the week of May 16 because the defense is requesting more documents from Jeremy’s restaurant.
In hindsight, Wildhaber says, he thinks Nogues was testing various methods from the very beginning. He said that during her first two weeks of employment, he caught her failing to turn in the mandatory 5 percent of her tips for kitchen workers.
They talked about it, and he didn’t fire her, he said.
“I was really was desperate for help, and customers really liked her,” he said.
In fact, he said, she wasn’t the sort of person anyone would ever suspect of being dishonest that way. Everybody liked her and customers loved her, he said.
Charging documents summarizing the Chehalis Police Department investigation indicate Wildhaber and his bookkeeper concluded that Nogues had been using another manager’s code to approve various transactions.
The issue was brought to his attention by his bookkeeper, he said. The bookkeeper discovered that far more gift certificates were being spent at the business than had ever been issued.
Wildhaber told police one has to have a manager’s code to put a gift certificate into the system. He said it would be easy to take cash from a customer, but show they paid with a gift certificate.
The bookkeeper made a sheet illustrating the estimated losses from Nogue, according to court documents.
In their affidavit of probable cause, prosecutors wrote that in in May, Nogues took in only one gift certificate, yet for the month of October, she had 38 transactions involving gift certificates. The other seven employees that month combined took in only 39, according to charging documents.
Jeremy’s also found that while employees were supposed to staple the gift certificate to the particular receipt, Nogues had only done that three times leaving 35 unaccounted for. The system also showed she submitted gift certificates for odd amounts, amounts larger than their ledger showed they had sold.
A printout from the restaurant’s transactions showed Nogues in June took in $2,272.74 in cash sales and $271.66 in gift certificates.
In October, it was just the opposite ratio.
Nogues in October logged just $209.79 in cash sales while recording she took in $2,448.95 worth of gift certificates, according to the documents.
Wildhaber told police it would be impossible to work an entire month and take in that little cash.
She allegedly used other manager’s codes in attempts to cover up cash thefts in other ways as well, according to the documents.
For example, printouts for July through September showed Nogues had $1,753 in voided transactions while the next highest amount among other employees was $577.11.
Some voids supposedly done for her by another manager occurred when the other manager wasn’t working, according to the allegations.
Wildhaber said he confronted Nogues and reported the theft to police on Oct. 30.
Today, Wildhaber no longer owns the business. He said he wasn’t able to pay rent, and his landlord took it over. He’s cooking there and still doing a lot of work connected with the criminal case.
“It’s a big mess,” he said.
The thefts aren’t the only reason he couldn’t continue, but played a role, he said.
“It put me in a downward spiral, really fast,” he said.
Last Thursday, after the hearing in Lewis County Superior Court, Nogues and her lawyer, Jakob McGhie, said they had no comment on the allegations.
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Full disclosure: Jeremy’s restaurant had an advertising relationship in the past with Lewis County Sirens.com
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