REGIONAL— Former Tower Clerk-Treasurer Linda Keith is scheduled to face a St. Louis County jury in December over felony charges stemming from her acknowledged destruction of a city laptop computer sometime last year. A pre-trial hearing in the case is set for Nov. 2, with the jury trial currently scheduled to begin on Dec. 1.
Keith is charged with damage to property in the first degree after she acknowledged to a Breitung police officer, shortly after her suspension as clerk-treasurer in June of 2019, that she had destroyed a city-owned laptop computer that she had been using. The city council had ordered Keith to return the laptop at the time of her suspension, but she never did so.
At the time, Keith stated that she had her son shoot the computer, then she ran over it with her pickup and subsequently burned the remains in a fire. She contends that the computer was no longer working at the time that she destroyed it, although that claim became difficult to verify given her apparent efforts to completely destroy the device. If convicted of the felony charge, Keith could face a maximum sentence of five years of incarceration and/or a $10,000 fine.
Keith and her defense attorney, Andrew Tiegs Poole, were successful in getting an earlier charge that she had falsified official city records dismissed. Keith and her attorney may face a tougher task with the remaining charge, given that Keith acknowledged her destruction of the device in her statement to police.