Vet tech stole about $560K from pet clinic. Now she’s facing prison
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Office manager admitted to stealing about $500,000 from urgent care center.
- She entered a Barr plea; prosecutors plan to seek a two‑year sentence.
- Accounting review traced escalating cash shortages from 2019 through 2023.
A Tri-Cities veterinary technician may head to prison for stealing about half a million dollars in cash from a Kennewick pet clinic over nearly five years.
Court documents said Kristina L. Ripplinger, 46, used her position as the office manager of Horse Heaven Hills Pet Urgent Care Center to help herself to cash paid for pet care.
Last week, she entered a “Barr” plea to second-degree theft in Benton County Superior Court. The plea means she doesn’t admit to committing the crime, but wanted to take advantage of the prosecutor’s offer.
The former office manager also pleaded to using her position of trust to steal a large amount of money.
While the crime would normally carry up to two months in jail, prosecutors plan to ask for an exceptional sentence of two years in prison.
Her attorney Randall Jameson is expected to ask for a lower sentence. She’s already been ordered to pay $563,000 in a civil case filed by the urgent care center.
Her sentencing hearing is April 15.
Ripplinger and her husband declared bankruptcy after the theft was discovered, but she was not legally released from the responsibility for the debt in the civil court case.
The state Department of Health license also has suspended her veterinarian technician license for 10 years.
Vet clinic embezzlement
Ripplinger became a licensed veterinary technician in 2004.
She was a friend of the urgent care center’s owner Sheila Erickson for a long time before Erickson asked her to help run the office in 2018, court documents said.
Ripplinger made herself the only person who handled the money and reconciled the financial statements.
Other than the Erickson, Ripplinger also was the only person to have a key to a locked box where the cash was stored.
In 2023, Erickson hired an accounting firm to look into ways to streamline the business. The accountants soon discovered something was wrong when they found only $740 in cash was deposited in January 2023. The last time that cash made it into the bank had been more than a year before in December 2022.
“When they first discovered this, the CPA reached out to the office and spoke with Ms. Ripplinger — who at the time they had no reason to suspect may have been behind the missing funds,” court documents said.
“Ms. Ripplinger was surprised that the CPA was looking into their cash management and claimed that everything was being taken care of.”
The accountants found far less cash was missing from the February deposits.
As the investigation continued, they discovered deposits appeared to be rounded off to whole numbers.
The bank deposits were made far less frequently than they should have been, court documents said.
Incomplete records made it hard to piece together the total missing money, court documents said. But the accountants found at least $2,500 went missing in 2019, but that number could have been as high as $40,000.
Another $29,000 disappeared in 2020. Then the missing amount jumped to $199,000 in 2021 and $221,000 in 2022.
At the time, the accountants estimated the total amount missing was $470,000.
When Erickson was told about the missing cash, she realized that Ripplinger was the only one who could have taken it. She looked at security video from April 2023, and saw her taking cash out of the bank’s money bag.
Investigators said Ripplinger used an ATM multiple times a month to deposit about $4,000.
When police spoke to Ripplinger, she admitted to stealing money from the business for at least two years. She planned to use the money to pay personal expenses. She said she tried to pay it back, but the amount grew too large, court documents said.