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Go to WestCovinaPress.com for West Covina Specific News M O N D AY, S E P T E M B E R 06 - S E P T E M B E R 12, 2021
Rancho Cucamonga Marine was one of the 13 service members killed at Kabul Airport The community of Rancho Cucamonga remembered Dylan Merola, Thursday evening at Freedom Courtyard. Lance Cpl. Dylan Merola was one of 13 service members killed in a suicide bombing at Kabul airport amid the U.S. evacuation of Afghanistan on Aug. 26, according to a report on KTLA. In his last message home, Merola told his mother he wouldn’t be able to speak to her for a while because he was being moved to a new location in Afghanistan. Merola, who was from Rancho Cucamonga, had only been in the country less than two weeks when he was killed, family members said. The 20-year-old Marine graduated from Los Osos
High School in 2019 and planned to study engineering in college after his military service. Lance Cpl. Dylan Merola arrived in Kabul less than two weeks before he was killed in last Thursday’s attack, according to his older brother. “Was notified last night,” the heartbroken sibling, David Merola, tweeted Saturday with a photo of the beaming Marine in fatigues. “RIP and say hey to dad & grandma for me.” Dylan Merola was a graduate of Los Osos High School in California.Twitter Merola, 20, of Rancho Cucamonga, Cal., and a graduate of Los Osos High School, was remembered as an enthusiastic member
of the school’s theater tech crew by classmate Benjamin Gruchy. “He always showed up with a smile and brought energy to everyone he was with,” Gruchy wrote in tribute on a GoFundMe campaign organized to assist Merola’s family. Word of his death quickly spread through the school, whose students wore red, white and blue at a Friday night football game to honor Merola’s sacrifice, the Orange County Register reported. His mother Cheryl Merola said that her son planned to attend college and pursue engineering. In his final text message to her, Dylan Merola said that he would not be able to call home during his evacuation assignment. “He wrote … ‘I love you and I’ll talk to you soon,’” she told CBS 2 news. “He was one of the best kids ever,” Cheryl Merola added. “Kind. Loving. Giving to every single person. He would give anything for anybody.” The identities of the 13 US service members who
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Dylan Merola. Courtesy photo of US Marines
were killed by an ISIS-K suicide bomber outside the Kabul airport while helping to oversee the evacuation of thousands of Americans and Afghan allies have been confirmed by authorities.
The US Marines on Saturday released the names of the dead, including 11 Marines, one Navy corpsman and one Army soldier. “We continue to mourn the loss of these Marines
and pray for their families. Our focus now is taking care of the families of those who were killed and caring for our injured,” Maj. Jim Stenger, a Marine Corps spokesperson, told The Post in an email.
Ex-Chairman of Los Angeles-Based church sentenced to more than 10 years in federal prison for stealing $11 million in church funds The former chairman of the board of the Fifth Church of Christ, Scientist, of Los Angeles was sentenced last week to 130 months in federal prison for stealing more than $11 million in church funds. Charles Thomas Sebesta, 56, of Huntington Beach, was sentenced by United States District Judge Stephen V. Wilson, who also ordered him to pay $11,438,213 in restitution. Sebesta pleaded guilty in February 2020 to one count of wire fraud and one count of bank fraud. He has been in federal custody since his arrest in August 2019. The church hired
Sebesta in 2001 as its facilities manager. He joined the church four years later and ultimately served as its chairman, giving him control over the church branch’s financial assets and operations, including some of its bank accounts. From at least August 2006 through December 2016, Sebesta caused the church to make checks and other payments to banks accounts in the name of fictitious companies he created, as well as to bank accounts he held in his own name and in the names of his family members and a female companion. To further conceal these
payments, Sebesta forged a church member’s signature on numerous checks drawn against the church’s bank accounts. In the fall of 2008, Sebesta oversaw the sale of church property in Hollywood for approximately $12.8 million. Sebesta stole a significant majority of the proceeds for his personal use, including purchasing a home with more than $2 million in cashier’s checks drawn from church bank accounts. The checks were falsely recorded in church records as “donations” and environmental remediation payments to a fictitious “Sky Blue Environmental”
company. In 2009 and 2010, Sebesta used church money to wire $1.86 million and $309,622 to be credited to his own personal tax accounts to generate overpayment refunds from the U.S. Treasury and the California Franchise Tax Board, respectively. To conceal his crimes, Sebesta impersonated a real estate developer by creating an email account in the executive’s name. Posing as the developer, Sebesta sent emails to church members in which he fraudulently represented that the real estate developer held Sebesta in high esteem and
was making donations to the church and paying the rent for the church’s new location. In total, Sebesta stole at least $11,438,213 of church assets. “Having wrested operational and financial control of the Church from its elderly members by 2006, [Sebesta] began a 10-year spree in which he treated the Church and its considerable assets as his own personal piggy bank,” prosecutors wrote in a sentencing memorandum. “[Sebesta] stole $11,438,213 and destroyed a venerable church, its congregation, and the faith its congregants had in one another
by employing sophisticated means to abuse his position of trust and cause the Church not only substantial, but ruinous, financial hardship.” Sebesta also defrauded another former employer – a private high school in Los Angeles County – out of $34,032 and embezzled $36,282 that a donor’s estate had donated to the church. The United States Secret Service investigated this matter. Assistant United States Attorneys Adam P. Schleifer and Valerie L. Makarewicz of the Major Frauds Section prosecuted this case.