Key West woman stole $250K from Sears while she was the manager, police said

A Key West woman already accused of stealing from the department store she once managed and a school’s PTO was arrested once again Friday after police said they discovered she had stolen much more than originally estimated.

Vivian Tapia-Smith, 38, helped herself to $254,790 from the Sears store off North Roosevelt Boulevard, police said.

In October of 2018, Tapia-Smith got caught in an alleged scheme to defraud Sears by regularly stealing the night cash deposits.

She was fired that month.

Financial records for Sears confirmed that the cash deposits from Jan. 4, 2018, through March 8, 2018, were never deposited into their bank account, said police spokeswoman Alyson Crean.

Tapia-Smith was arrested on felony charges of grand theft and organized fraud.

Police said they checked the bank account she shares with her sister and saw that more than a dozen cash deposits were made in January and February 2018 and October 2018.

In 2017, more than $82,000 in cash was deposited into the same account, police said records show. In 2018, the total amount of cash deposited was $76,000, police said.

In an interview with detectives in April, she denied taking any money from the store, according to the arrest warrant.

“I don’t have two nickels to rub together,” she said, according to police.

She was released from the Stock Island Detention Center on the same day without having to post a bond, according to the jail’s online records.

Tapia-Smith was previously accused this year of stealing more than $32,000 from Sears while running the store.

A Sears administrator noticed the missing money in October 2018, police said.

Tapia-Smith Was arrested earlier this month after police said she stole nearly $10,000 from a parent teacher organization at Poinciana Elementary School in Key West.

From late December 2018 until August, Tapia-Smith made more than 20 unauthorized cash withdrawals from the Poinciana Elementary School PTO’s account that totaled $9,800, police said.

Financial records show she simply deposited the stolen cash into her personal bank account, police said.

Efforts to reach Tapia-Smith have been unsuccessful.

This story was originally published December 30, 2019 at 6:31 PM.

Gwen Filosa

Miami Herald

Gwen Filosa covers Key West and the Lower Florida Keys for FLKeysNews.com and the Miami Herald and lives in Key West. She was part of the staff at the New Orleans Times-Picayune that in 2005 won two Pulitzer Prizes for coverage of Hurricane Katrina. She graduated from Indiana University.