ABBOT – A former key employee of Trafton’s Family Affair was arrested Thursday for the alleged theft of $28,000 in Maine State Lottery scratch tickets.

Daralyn Herrick of Abbot was arrested on a warrant for Class B theft by Piscataquis County Sheriff John Goggin and was taken to the Piscataquis County Jail. She was released from jail Thursday afternoon after family members posted her bail of $30,000 and one surety or 10 percent cash.

A court date has not yet been set, Goggin said late Thursday afternoon. Herrick could face a prison term of more than 10 years and a substantial fine for the Class B crime, he said.

Herrick is alleged to have taken $28,433 in scratch tickets from the store from Jan. 1, 2000, through May 15 of 2001. It is unknown just how many of those were winning tickets, Goggin said.

The sheriff said store owner Barbara Trafton had noticed a decline in the store’s profit over several months but had attributed that to a downturn in the economy. An investigation was conducted after Trafton was told by a clerk from another local store that one of Trafton’s clerks was stopping in on a regular basis to cash a large amount of winning scratch tickets, Goggin said. During the joint investigation conducted by Trafton, the Maine State Lottery Commission and the Sheriff’s Department that began on May 11, it was learned that Herrick also had routinely cashed in winning scratch tickets at other local stores, he said.

“These types of situations are just tragic for everyone involved, but there’s only one person responsible for this and she has been charged,” Goggin said.

Trafton said she had no reason to believe a theft had occurred. “We treated her like our own daughter; I placed a lot of trust in this employee and had no reason from her previous history to expect any different,” she said.