Matt Kadosh

Staff Writer, @MattKadosh

Records show she entered a plea in shoplifting case

Town officials mum as per settlement agreement

More than a year after the offense, a suspended Belleville police officer accused of shoplifting has resigned from her post and collected compensation for her unused sick days, records show.

Wanda Posada Vallese resigned and on March 23 entered a disorderly person’s plea in connection with the December 2015 offense, according to the agreement obtained by NorthJersey.com through the state’s Open Public Records Act.

The document obtained on Friday, April 28, does not disclose the disposition of Posada's plea.

According to the settlement agreement, the incident involved a lottery ticket.

According to documents obtained by John Paff, chairman of the New Jersey Libertarian Party's Open Government project, the incident involved the alleged theft of a $50 bottle of tequila.

While the settlement agreement prohibits the parties from disclosing its terms, the matter of municipal payments to Posada has been touched on at Township Council meetings, where Belleville resident Bill Mildon III, a retired private investigator, has repeatedly raised the matter.

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Asked on Friday, April 28, about the recently amended settlement agreement, Mildon said he will continue to demand answers from his local government about Posada.

“She should have been fired so that she couldn’t have collected anything,” Mildon said, referring to the unused sick and vacation pay Posada is collecting in exchange for resigning and entering the plea. “That’s what should have been.”

Posada, who earned $94,945 the year prior, is granted payment for 21 unused sick days under the agreement, minus health benefits the municipality paid for her subsequent to her suspension, the agreement shows. It does not detail a dollar amount.

History

The 2015 incident is not Posada's first alleged shoplifting.

As previously reported by the Belleville Times, in 2006 Posada, who at the time used the last name Scheumeister, had been arrested at the K-Mart on Main Street in Belleville in connection with the theft of mosquito repellent and two boxes of lawn edging.

Posada was then suspended without pay and later returned to work following a complaint she filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC).

In March of this year, Paff had expressed concern that no charges had been filed since Posada's shoplifting arrest in December 2015, and there had been no conclusion in the case for 15 months.

“If it was me, and it was shoplifting from a liquor store, and they had a copy of a video and a credit card receipt, they would very quickly wrap this up,” he said, citing the records he obtained through OPRA. “It is disconcerting that they’re taking over a year to wrap this up."

Email: kadosh@northjersey.com