No Arrest Warrant for Local Priest, by Jon Karroll, KRDO, May 29, 2009

No Arrest Warrant for Local Priest

By Jon Karroll
KRDO
May 29, 2009

http://www.krdo.com/Global/story.asp?S=10445202

COLORADO SPRINGS - There is no arrest warrant for a local priest accused of embezzling money from his church.

An El Paso County Court spokesperson tells NEWSCHANNEL 13 a misunderstanding led to the warrant being issued for Father Donald Armstrong. Armstrong's attorney had waived his advisement hearing scheduled for Wednesday, but somehow the court didn't get that information and thought Armstrong had skipped his court date.

The warrant was quashed Friday morning.

Armstrong's first court appearance is now June 10th.

Armstrong is accused of stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars from a church trust fund.

Police say Rev. Donald Armstrong took the funds to pay for his kids' college tuition. "It has been a very lengthy investigation," says Lt. David Whitlock with the Colorado Springs Police Department, "[investigators] have been putting a lot of hard work into it and they're not done yet."

An affidavit from CSPD states that Armstrong misused $392,000 and that he wrote monthly checks from July 1999 to March 2006. Those were the years Armstrong's children were in college. "There are hundreds upon thousands of pages of information that need to be looked at," says Whitlock of the lengthy investigation, "as well as computer records."

NEWSCHANNEL 13 was there when investigators raided the Grace and Episcopal Church in November of 2008. They took files of financial documents and computers. "It has to be done that way," says Whitlock, "when you have those kinds of disposable evidence that someone could get rid of if they new we were coming."

The affidavit says Armstrong claims he was using the funds for scholarships for his children and that he was authorized to do so by former parish wardens. But, police found no documents signed by the wardens approving the money for Armstrong's use.

"It's not clear to us that he's the only suspect," Whitlock says, "certainly he's named in the warrant as being someone questioned about what happened to some of the monies there." The ecclesiastical court indicted Armstrong in 2007. The investigation is ongoing. Police say they will eventually turn it over to prosecutors.