Live Oak man gets 4-year sentence for elder abuse
September 27, 2011
A Live Oak man was sentenced this week in Sutter County Superior Court to four years in state prison for stealing money from a hospitalized woman who asked him to deliver her mail and bills.
Kelvin Gene Lay, 48, earlier pleaded guilty to elder abuse for forging 36 checks to himself during her three-month hospital stay for a theft of more than $6,000, possibly to pay his own bills, said Sutter County District Attorney Carl Adams. The 90-year-old woman Lay stole from was on a fixed income and the caretaker of an adult disabled son, Adams said.
Lay and his victim had known each other for about eight years. They were not related, but it was a situation "where she treated him like a son," Adams said.
The timing of Lay's sentencing Monday landed him the prison sentence, but had he been sentenced next week, he would have faced only county jail time under state prison realignment. Starting Saturday, people who are convicted of low-level crimes such as elder abuse by stealing are not classified as serious enough felonies to merit prison time and will instead be sentenced to serve their time in a county facility.
The prison realignment, which legislators passed as part of the 2011-12 budget, aims to trim the state's overcrowded prison population and cut costs. Sutter and Yuba counties have expressed concerns that local jails may soon face overcrowding as a result of taking in people newly convicted of nonviolent, nonsexual and nonserious felonies such as drug possession, vehicle theft, battery and second-degree bu glary.
Lay was arrested April 5 on suspicion of burglary, forgery, grand theft and embezzlement from an elder adult, according to jail records. His previous record includes an arrest in 1996 on suspicion of forgery and issuing fraudulent checks, but the charges were dismissed, and a 16-month prison sentence in 2002 for a probation violation.
Sutter County has more cases of elder abuse like Lay's case, Adams said, but it does not have as many as other areas.
"In a smaller community like this, people tend to know each other better and our elderly in Sutter County are protected better than average," he said. "It's more likely they will have friends who look in on them ... or there are more personal links that help support them."
SOURCE: The Appeal-Democrat
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