Two Elkhart County police officers face felony charges of claiming hours they didn't work
ELKHART — A pair of Elkhart County patrolmen face felony charges after an investigation found they worked as security officers at a bank during hours they said they were performing police duties.
The officers — Donald McQuarie and William Fackelman — each clocked in to work at their secondary jobs at Lake City Bank while still claiming those hours as working for the police department, court documents said. The pattern took place from November 2021 to March and resulted in the county paying for more than 90 hours of work that was not performed.
Both men are charged with ghost employment — a Level 6 Felony that applies to government employees and prohibits "work other than the performance of official duties during working hours."
McQuarie has resigned from the county police department, Sheriff Jeff Siegel said in a written statement, while Fackelman remains with the department on paid suspension. The pair were booked into the Elkhart County Jail, but have posted bail.
According to court documents in the case, both McQuarie and Fackelman worked early morning shifts with county police, working from 5 a.m. to 1 p.m. and 4 a.m. to noon respectively, doing background checks and writing writs for other officers in the field. Both men also worked secondary jobs as security officers at Lake City Bank in the afternoon when they were off-duty.
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One day, March 7, a police department supervisor noticed something unusual. According to documents, there was a crash that day at 10:48 a.m. but no officers were immediately responding due to a high volume of calls. In an attempt to find who was closest to the area, the supervisor pulled up the officers' GPS locations and saw Fackelman was at his off-duty bank job, documents said.
The discrepancy caused the supervisor to check the locations for various officers and eventually found that both Fackelman and McQuarie would often be at Lake City Bank to work their second jobs before they said they ended their shifts as police officers.
All told, an Indiana State Police investigation allegedly found McQuarie logged 25 hours where he was supposedly working for the sheriff's department but was actually working security at the bank and being double-paid. Fackelman logged about 67 hours of double-pay, investigators allege in court documents.
If convicted of the ghost employment charges as felonies, McQaurie and Fackelman face between six months and 2 ½ years in jail. However, Indiana law allows judges to treat convictions for most low-level felonies as misdemeanors, meaning it is unlikely either officer will serve jail time.
Email Marek Mazurek at mmazurek@sbtinfo.com. Follow him on Twitter: @marek_mazurek
This article originally appeared on South Bend Tribune: Crime: Elkhart police officers face felony charges of time theft
