They are the parents of a child with disabilities who started a non-profit, Caring Communities, to help families facing similar challenges.
But nothing prepared Mona and Jay Freedman for a decade of deception at the hands of Robbin Davlin, 52.
"She was the bookkeeper. She was the Expo assistant. She was in charge of all the invoicing, all the accounts receivable, you know everything in and everything out, and after nine years, we became friends with her," said Mona Freedman.
The Freedmans and Davlins even vacationed together, getting a rare taste of luxury as both the non-profit and an event business plummeted towards bankruptcy, and then two years ago, the Freedmans discovered their 12-dollar-per-hour bookkeeper was baking the books.
"We discovered when we had to sell our home, we really started digging into our savings accounts," said Mona Freedman.
"That's when we saw some abnormalities that led us to... you pull the string and you unravel it and you start seeing, 'Wait a minute. What's this?' and you keep pulling and we confronted her,” added Mona’s husband, “She admitted after a long pause and her face turning white that she in fact was doing this---was stealing."
Initially, Davlin claimed she had stolen $30,000, but that hardly touched the surface.
"So it was 2600 items went to her home that we circled from our charge card, so you had to go over years and years, month by month and see that it was pee pads for her dog, it was a Nissan car for a child, it was Balfour high school rings, it was vacations," said Freedman.
It also was forgery---checks written for cash worth almost a quarter of a million dollars.
Now, investigators believe Davlin made off with more than $400,000 worth of cash and goods and there’s still more than a year’s worth of records unaccounted for.
"We didn't think we were making anything for years and years,” said Freedman, “We were just working, like spinning our wheels. She had us like a hamster on a wheel. She kept trying too. 'Why don't you just schedule another event? Why don't you take out another loan? Why don't you take out another charge card?' She had to keep feeding herself I guess."
It appears the suspect used five different charge cards, two separate PayPal accounts and a couple of different bank accounts to pull off the decade worth of thefts.
On Friday, a judge released her with no bond, and she’s said to be living out of state.
