Former St. Vincent de Paul Outreach Director Charged with Theft of a Business

Thursday, October 23rd, 2025 -- 12:00 PM

(Karen Madden, Marshfield News-Herald) The former outreach director for St. Vincent de Paul in Marshfield was charged Oct. 21 with stealing $108,549 from the charity.

According to Karen Madden with the Marshfield News-Herald, Trisha L. Hebert, 37, of Marshfield, faces charges of theft of more than $100,000 from a business, fraudulent use of a bank card and fraudulent writings from a corporate officer.

She's scheduled to make her initial court appearance Dec. 1. According to the criminal complaint, Hebert was the outreach director for St. Vincent de Paul in Marshfield for almost five years. She resigned in the middle of August 2024 and worked until the middle of September 2024.

In the middle of August, a St. Vincent de Paul employee went to the Marshfield Police Department with financial documents and said she believed someone had embezzled money from the charity.

The employee had noticed multiple cash withdrawals from ATMs, as well as money taken from a medical account that the employee didn't feel were related to St. Vincent de Paul, according to the complaint.

The employee said she believed Hebert was the one taking the money, but she didn't have any proof, according to the complaint. The employee also had a copy of a check written out to Hebert for $3,169 that Hebert had signed at the bottom and endorsed on the back.

The memo said "for 123 vacation hours," according to the complaint. Detectives started looking at the transactions and found someone had been using the bank card at ATMs at a service station in Marshfield and at numerous businesses outside the Marshfield area.

Many of the places where the bank card was used at an ATM were near a casino, according to the complaint. Detectives were able to get video of some of the ATM transactions and saw Hebert using the ATMs, according to the complaint.

They would see her take $200 or more from the ATM, then buy cigarettes, snacks and lottery cards. When a detective talked to Hebert, she said she did take money out of the ATMs for St. Vincent de Paul business and did not use that money for the things detectives saw her buying on video.

Hebert said she worked long hours that didn't give her time to go to the bank, so she would use ATMs while she was running errands. Hebert told the detective she was using the cash to provide mortgage or rent assistant to St. Vincent de Paul clients, according to the complaint.

She said a bank had told her not to write checks to provide mortgage assistance because the bank might turn to St. Vincent de Paul for money if the client defaulted on their loan.

Hebert gave several reasons why the number of requests for mortgage or rent assistance had gone up drastically, according to the complaint. Hebert said she hadn't had time to document all the assistance requests, but she had kept track of them on a spreadsheet.

She said the spreadsheet was lost when her computer crashed. A detective reached out to several of the people listed as having help with their mortgages. He talked to six people listed as receiving mortgage help from the charity but said they had not received help, according to the complaint.

Hebert told a detective she had kept receipts in a binder folder with divided areas for everything she took cash to purchase for St. Vincent de Paul. She said the folder had fallen out her car window while she was at a conference in Sioux Falls during the summer of 2024.

She said there was severe rain in the area and the binder quickly became saturated. Hebert said she took the receipts to her hotel room to try to dry them out, but the rain had made the ink run, and they were destroyed.

Detectives determined many of the significant cash withdrawals, those between $1,000 and $5,000, were made within 24 hours of her gambling at a casino. Detectives determined Hebert removed $108,649 from St. Vincent de Paul accounts without any record of where the money was used, according to the complaint.

If convicted of all three charges, Hebert faces a maximum sentence of 15-1/2 years in prison.

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