The Fergus Falls Daily Journal

An Osakis woman will have to pay a hefty restitution for buying 12 head of cattle with a fraudulent check last year.mankind

Cassandra Ann Mclain, 27, was sentenced Thursday for a gross misdemeanor check forgery charge. She was sentenced to 20 days in jail, was fined $500, and must pay $7,186.83 in restitution. She was also placed on supervised probation for two years.

Mclain wrote the check on Feb. 1, 2010, when she bought the cattle from the Perham Stockyard, according to court records. The check she used belonged to another man whose checking account was closed at the time she wrote the check. Mclain was accompanied by her sister, Nicole Twa, and her boyfriend at the time, Dustin Fate, neither of whom have been charged in the incident.

Two days later, the three sold 11 of the cattle at the Tri-County Stockyard in Motley, where Mclain lived at the time. A worker at the Perham Stockyard learned of this and found it suspicious, a thought that was soon compounded by the discovery that Mclain has used a check on a closed account.

On Feb. 5, records stated, an investigator on the case received a report from Staples, where Mclain and Twa had tried to buy $480 of clothing from a store called The Thread Shed. Mclain again used the checks from the closed account, and she claimed to be the fiancée of the man who the checks belonged to.

The man, also of Motley, was later interviewed by law enforcement. He admitted to issuing some checks while his account was closed (he has a theft by check charge in another county from around the same time as Mclain wrote her checks), but he said that Mclain had stolen the checks from him when she helped him move.

Later, the complaint stated, other witnesses reported seeing an acquaintance of Mclain burn some checks in a wood stove. The checks are believed to have been the ones taken from the Motley man’s home.