Former airport employee sentenced for theft
Sep. 28—Melissa Sue Hall, 46, of South Point, Ohio, was sentenced Tuesday to five months in prison, to be followed by three years of supervised release with the first five months on home detention with electronic monitoring, for theft of federal funds. Hall was also ordered to pay $49,478.64 in restitution.
According to court documents and statements made in court, from September 2017 until Jan. 8, 2021, Hall was the finance director of Huntington Tri-State Airport and responsible for the accounting, depositing and withdrawing of funds from multiple revenue sources including ATMs and vending machines.
Hall admitted that between May 2020 and Jan. 8, 2021, she stopped depositing the full amounts she collected from these machines into the airport's bank accounts. Hall further admitted that she took money from those bank accounts intended for deposit in the ATMs.
During this time period, Tri-State Airport received at least $10,000 per year in federal funding, which was deposited in its bank accounts. Hall admitted to diverting nearly $49,500.
