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| Woman arrested for forging check fell through cracks By David F. Smydra Jr.--[ david@hmbreview.com ] Published/Last Modified on Wednesday, October 31, 2007 4:52 PM PDT Sheri Lynne Gallo, a San Francisco woman with one leg and no luck, was arrested for trying to cash a forged check in Half Moon Bay earlier this month. The Oct. 5 incident serves as a puzzling installment in the life of a woman who just a few years ago attracted media attention in Michigan for not receiving proper medical care from that state. Gallo, 42, lived with her mother in Traverse City at the time. Reporters at the Traverse City Record-Eagle wrote three stories in 2004 about caretakers on the state payroll abandoning Gallo. The state also refused to contribute to the unemployed woman's medical bills. After the newspaper's stories and much effort from her mother, Carolyn Tithof, Gallo began receiving some help from the state, including a motorized scooter and money for medical care. Readers also reached out. A local dentist fitted Gallo for complimentary dentures that she needed after having spent months in a coma that resulted in massive tooth loss. Today, Gallo is described as a homeless woman in San Francisco's Tenderloin neighborhood. When she was arrested for trying to pass the forged check at the Wells Fargo Bank in Half Moon Bay, authorities discovered she also had four outstanding misdemeanor warrants from San Francisco - one for solicitation and three for "loitering with intent to solicit," a charge prosecutors say is obscure and little-used. No one could say how Gallo, who does not own a car, made it down to Half Moon Bay to attempt to cash the forged check. Wells Fargo staff called Half Moon Bay police to the branch on Highway 92 when they suspected a forgery in progress. The San Mateo County district attorney's office reported that Gallo attempted to cash a check in the amount of $3,895 and also withdraw $6,500, both from an account that did not belong to her. Gallo had a checkbook that had been reported lost or stolen in San Francisco a couple of weeks earlier by a resident in that city. When police searched Gallo, they say they found a credit card belonging to a second victim, as well as a pipe used for smoking crack cocaine. On Oct. 19, Gallo appeared in a Redwood City courtroom and pleaded no contest to three of the nine misdemeanors she faced. The charges were for commercial burglary, identity theft and possession of drug paraphernalia. "Eight of the nine were different ways of saying the same thing," said her court-appointed defender, Lisa Maguire. "It was just a matter of there being a number of different ways of charging the same incident." Gallo was sentenced to two years' court-ordered probation and 15 days in jail. Since she had been in custody for two weeks by that point, she only served one more day before she was scheduled for extradition to San Francisco to appear for her outstanding warrants. She spent her birthday in jail. "She wasn't a 'poor me' kind of client. She was easy to deal with, and took responsibility and felt bad about the situation," Maguire said. Chuck Olson, a San Francisco retiree who has known Gallo for the past few months, attended the Oct. 19 hearing. Olson said he had seen Gallo around the neighborhood and admitted that her amputation made her hard to ignore. Although Gallo had received a prosthetic leg in 2004, Olson said he had never seen her with it. The police report filed at the time of her arrest confirmed that the officer saw Gallo with crutches and only one leg. Reached at home in Michigan, Tithof said her daughter's fight to obtain proper medical care there was a "long, hard struggle." Gallo moved back in with Tithof in early 2004, almost a year after she had been injured in San Francisco. "She fell in an apartment complex, on a trash bag that was left in a hallway," Tithof said. "Something went through her kneecap. She went into septic shock for five months. They had to amputate her leg due to the sepsis, which infected her entire body." Gallo also lapsed into a coma for months while receiving medical care in California, her mother said. The first Record-Eagle article to mention Gallo ran on April 25, 2004, and featured a photograph of her with the new leg. The caption also mentions that Medicaid approved the removal of 18 teeth but not the anesthesia nor hospitalization required for the procedure. The next article ran on the front page of the paper's June 21, 2004, edition. The story reports Tithof's attempt to obtain a motorized scooter from a doctor's prescription. She was turned away by the state's Medicaid program because Gallo was signed up for home care. "I couldn't believe it. I went into a state of shock when they said we had a worker," the Record-Eagle quoted Tithof as saying. Tithof said the state had been "paying someone who hasn't shown up at our house since last year." Michigan agencies confirmed that checks were issued to a delinquent worker who never helped Gallo - though the worker never cashed those checks. Three days later, another story ran in which Tithof reported that the state, shamed by the coverage, had swooped into action. Medicaid provided the scooter and a representative from Gov. Jennifer Granholm's office called Tithof, saying that arrangements had been made to pay Gallo's $5,000 tab in physical therapy bills. "When we found out about all these people willing to help, Sheri just sat in bed and cried and cried," the paper quoted Tithof as saying. A follow-up story ran the next month, reporting that the state attorney general's office was still investigating how Gallo's service had originally fallen through the cracks. Over time, Gallo apparently yearned to come back to San Francisco. "She started to feel better and got a little more self-confidence about herself and was ready to move on," Tithof said. "The temperature's good for her there. She was always hot and sweating (in Michigan) and she didn't want to take her medications. At the time she was on 17. We had a drugstore." Tithof said Gallo left Traverse City in September of 2006. She visited a friend in Las Vegas and then went to San Francisco. "I was skeptical. I still am skeptical," Tithof said of the care and attention that Gallo is receiving in California. "Her scooter was stolen. Her wheelchair was stolen," she said. Gallo and Tithof speak on a regular basis, according to the mother. Olson and Tithof don't agree on some aspects of Gallo's troubled past. "She didn't lose her leg by falling down in an apartment," Olson said, describing Gallo's own explanation for her 2003 accident. "She was hit by a car. Three people seriously injured, one of them died." Olson claimed that Gallo has been trying to obtain a settlement for the incident, but did not express confidence in her attorney. Aside from the settlement, Olson just wants to make sure that Gallo can obtain whatever services she can get that might keep her from trying another risky venture like passing a bad check. "That's my interest, seeing what kind of state services she can plug into," he said. "She's been a target of pretty bad people." Gallo was released from San Francisco's penal system on Oct. 22, charges from her previous warrants apparently dropped. (The San Francisco County district attorney's office did not return repeated calls for confirmation.) Gallo declined, through Olson, to speak to the Review about her situation. Tithof continues to speak with Gallo and hopes she can find some stability in her life. "She sounds happy and that's all that I can ask for," Tithof said. |