County Worker Accused of Big Phone Tab

In what one official called the biggest misuse of county phones in memory, a Los Angeles County mental health employee is accused of making about 2,500 calls to various psychic hotlines and running up a $120,000 phone tab.

Cheryl Burnham, 39, who lives in the Antelope Valley, is charged with one count of felony grand theft and two counts of commercial burglary, and if convicted could be sentenced up to four years and four months in prison, said Deputy Dist. Atty. Robert Dver, who is handling the case.

“It’s a new one on me, and it’s a new one on the people around me,” Dver said.

Burnham, who is free on her own recognizance, has plead not guilty. Her attorney, Deputy Public Defender E. John Myers, declined to discuss the case in detail, and said Burnham would have no comment because the matter is still pending before the court.

The phone calls allegedly were made at night and on weekends between June 1997 and November 1998 from McClaren Hall, the children’s crisis center in El Monte. Burnham held a clerical position there, and the calls were traced back to her work area, said Marion Romeis, head of the special investigations unit of the county auditor-controller’s office.

Officials said they discovered the irregular charges during a routine periodic audit, and launched an investigation in March 1998.

“We had been aware of the problem for a while, but we let her continue because we had to catch her at it,” said Romeis, who called the county phone misuse the most egregious she could recall. The calls were monitored during times when Burnham was known to be the only one in her area at a given time, Romeis added. Bills were then checked against calls made at those times.

Most calls went to one psychic hotline, Romeis said. Officials declined to provide the name of that company.

Most county phones are blocked to prevent calls to unauthorized area codes.

The calls were not immediately detected because a computer modem line was apparently used, circumventing the regular phone system, which requires supervisors to sign off on long-distance calls.

Modem lines are dedicated to computers and fax machines and didn’t require supervision, a department official said.

“It’s something that didn’t need to go through the system at the time,” said David Meyer, chief deputy director of the Department of Mental Health. “Needless to say, that’s changed.”

After discovering the irregular phone charges, the county reviewed its system and made changes to guard against future misuse of fax and modem lines, Meyer said.

If convicted, Burnham probably would be required to pay back in full the cost of the calls, Dver said.

“She has no prior record, so it’s unlikely in the extreme that she would get the maximum sentence,” Dver said. A pretrial conference is scheduled July 8, with a court trial scheduled July 16.

Myers, Burnham’s attorney, expressed doubt about the prosecution’s case.

“They’re going to have to show she made every single one of those phone calls,” he said. “I just don’t think they can prove that.”