Palm Beach Police: Front desk worker at beachfront hotel stole cash from guest
When a man visiting Palm Beach from Argentina checked into his hotel May 31, he and his two cousins were eager to go shopping for food and get settled into their temporary beachside abode.
Instead, according to Palm Beach Police, the man returned to his room a few hours later to find that $5,800 in U.S. cash was missing from a brown leather bag he left on a table in the room — cash that was taken, allegedly, by the same hotel employee who at the front desk welcomed the man and checked in his reservation.
According to an arrest report, that employee, a 31-year-old West Palm Beach woman, took the cash from the man's room within an hour of his leaving to shop for groceries.
The man told police that he and his cousins dropped off their luggage in the hotel's Room 309 before going to the Walmart in Palm Springs. Surveillance video provided by the hotel to detectives confirmed the trio arrived at the hotel about 1:50 p.m. and then left about a half-hour later.
The employee, at about 3 p.m., went into a back room of the hotel, removed a master key for one of the rooms and took it with her, surveillance video showed. The hotel's manager told police that after the employee's shift ended at 3 p.m., she did not have authorization to remove any master keys or enter any guest rooms.
She started walking toward the hotel's exit, then quickly changed course and got into an elevator, the arrest report said. Once there, she looked at a folded piece of paper she had in her pocket, police said. They noted that the second through seventh floors of the hotel — which would include the floor where the man from Argentina was staying — were not under video surveillance.
The next time the employee was seen on the hotel's video-surveillance system, she was in a stairwell that lead to the pool deck. She walked toward the parking lot, got into her car and drove away, the report said.
A Palm Beach Police detective July 16 met with the employee at a probation and parole office in West Palm Beach, where she was scheduled for a regular meeting with her parole officer regarding another incident. After being told her rights, the woman admitted to taking a master key from the hotel's lock box May 31 and going to the guest's room. She told the detective she did not take $5,800, instead saying it was no more than $2,000, and that she thought it was $1,800. She could pay it back, she said.
When asked how she spent the cash, the woman told police that she paid for her daughter's dance recital and a doctor's appointment.
She noted that the money was folded in half, and it was "old-fashioned green tint 100-dollar bills," the arrest report said. She saw the brown leather bag on a table in the room, but the money was next to it, not inside, according to police.
The woman was arrested July 16 and charged with unarmed burglary of an unoccupied dwelling and grand theft of more than $5,000 and less than $10,000, court records show. According to Palm Beach County Jail records, she was released July 23 on a $30,000 bond.
This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Daily News: Palm Beach Police: Hotel front desk worker stole cash from guest
