PORT TOWNSEND — Two Jefferson County sheriff’s deputies plan to fly to Arizona sometime next week to retrieve Christine F. Nelson, a former secretary of the Jefferson County Fire Protection District 5, who is charged with stealing $77,153.59 from the district in 2006 and 2007.
Nelson was arrested on April 29 in Phoenix, and is in the Maricopa County jail, said Jefferson County Sheriff’s Det. Barb Garrett
Neslon, who has waived extradition proceedings, was charged in January in Jefferson County with first-degree theft and forgery in connection with the missing fire district funds.
She had left the area in 2007, after she was placed on administrative leave in May without pay.
Nelson is expected to be back in Jefferson County by May 16, said Garrett, who has been tracking Nelson for over a year, and who will be one of the officers traveling to Phoenix to pick her up.
Garrett said she had been waiting for Nelson to make a mistake.
“I knew that she was in Arizona somewhere,” Garrett said.
“When I did my background investigation and talked to friends of hers, one of those contacts told me that she was in Arizona.
“The key was, I knew that she had her kids back with her, and she would eventually enroll them in school.”
Garrett said that meant Nelson would need to obtain school records from her two daughters’ old schools in Port Angeles.
