OGDEN, Utah — A former Weber County Sheriff’s Office employee has been charged, accused of using methamphetamine on the job that was taken from the evidence room.
The Weber County Attorney charged Candice Follum with 40 counts. She faced 20 third-degree felony counts of altering a record, and another 20 counts of drug possession, a class A misdemeanor. She was not arrested on Tuesday, but given a summons to appear in Ogden’s 2nd District Court at a later date.
Documents obtained by FOX 13 under a public records request earlier this year included a handwritten note from Follum, admitting to taking drugs from the evidence room.
“Over the course of 2017, I took drugs (meth) from about 15-20 cases located in the evidence room. There is a box containing most of these cases located in the office in the upper cabinet where the evidence sheets are kept,” she wrote in the note, which was reiterated in a police affidavit filed with the charges.
Police also said in the affidavit that Follum “admitted that she had become addicted to methamphetamine while working at the Sheriff’s Office and had been stealing drugs from evidence for three years. She admitted to using meth every other day. She indicated her manner of use was by eating methamphetamine. She claimed she only used when she was at work.”
Police said the drugs were removed by pulling envelopes from the evidence room and then looking up the case in the court system to see if the defendant had been sentenced.
“If the case was closed and she did not think anyone would come looking for the
drugs, then that would be a case from which she would take the methamphetamine,” police wrote.
Officers wrote in the charging documents they discovered the problem during an audit and 38 envelopes containing drugs had been compromised.
The situation has impacted a number of cases in 2nd District Court. At least a dozen had to be dismissed, Weber County Attorney Chris Allred told FOX 13 in May.