A judge on Tuesday found the organizer of the Will County chapter of Mothers Against Drunk Driving guilty of stealing from the group meetings she started after her son was killed by a drunken driver.
Antoinette Wilda, 48, of Joliet, who had been free on bond, was taken into custody immediately after the ruling by Will County Circuit Judge Carla Alessio-Goode.
Wilda will be sentenced March 26 and could receive from probation to 7 years in prison.
Alessio-Goode did not offer any explanation for her ruling after the more than 2-week trial.
Prosecutors said Wilda pocketed about $45,000 or two-thirds of the fees taken in at some MADD-sponsored meetings from 2000 to 2003, and forged documents to conceal it.
Wilda was found not guilty of forgery. The forgery charges were based on allegations she used the photocopied signature of a state trooper on documents she passed on to the national MADD organization and underreported the number of people at the meetings.
The meetings were victim-impact panels, in which relatives of victims of drunken driving crashes tell their stories to convicted drunken drivers in the hopes they will change their ways.
The motive for the three-year theft, prosecutors said in closing arguments Tuesday, was lack of income because Wilda and her husband, David, faced periods of unemployment. Authorities said the Wildas’ income was about $1,000 a month but that expenses were nearly double that.
“It’s clear this defendant was not living from paycheck to paycheck, but from victim-impact panel to victim-impact panel,” said Kavita Chopra, a Will County assistant state’s attorney.
Wilda’s lawyer, Phil Mock, said he would file notices to appeal the verdict. He argued in his closing that bad bookkeeping was to blame.
“We feel there was no forgery,” he said. “We feel there was no theft.”
Wilda’s husband declined to comment after the verdict.
Representatives of MADD said they felt vindicated by the trial and ruling, which came after an internal audit by the national organization found bookkeeping irregularities.
“I am delighted with her ruling,” said David Malham, senior victim advocate for MADD’s Illinois office in Chicago, who observed several days of the trial.
The Will County situation led MADD to stiffen its security procedures and otherwise make changes to ensure such theft would not happen again, he said. The organization had not typically questioned the honesty of volunteers, especially one who was so touched by the tragedy of drunken driving, he added.
Wilda’s 15-year-old son was walking down a Joliet street when he was killed by a drunken driver in 1993. A few years later, Wilda founded the MADD chapter in Will County, which began running victim-impact panels in the late 1990s.
Malham said he was most shocked that Wilda could “exploit the victim status for her own funds.”
He said the MADD organization was considering a civil lawsuit to recoup the losses and was particularly troubled because the money collected from participants, who had to pay $20 each, was supposed to be used for MADD.
“Stealing from General Motors is not like stealing from Mothers Against Drunk Driving,” he said. “This is money that would have gone to victim services.”
Since last year, the victim-impact panels in Will County have been run by the Schaumburg-based Alliance Against Intoxicated Motorists.
Malham said he hopes MADD of Illinois will be able to offer such services in Will County in the future.
