The grimmest sale of the year will take place right around the first anniversary of the grimmest murder in South Dakota. Yesterday Judge Bruce Anderson approved an auction of the loot Scott Westerhuis didn’t set on fire before killing his wife, kids, and himself to escape prosecution for embezzling over a million dollars in taxpayer education dollars. Scott Westerhuis took his family’s lives in the middle of the night September 17, 2015; the estate auction will take place the week of September 12.
As tends to happen in such ugly cases, the people cleaning up the mess are getting compensated before the people who got screwed:
Anderson also approved an initial list of creditors set to be paid back first upon the completion of the auction. He said the couple’s funeral expenses along with compensation for estate representatives and attorneys would be repaid first. Then about a dozen other credit card companies, banks and workers would be repaid. Morgan said she wasn’t sure the funds won at auction would cover all the requests.
“I don’t know if there’s enough to go around here to make everybody completely whole,” Morgan said.
Jim Brenner, an electrician from Armour, sat in the courtroom Thursday afternoon waiting to hear whether he would be repaid for extensive work he did on the Westerhuis’s home in Platte.
“I just hope I get something,” Brenner said [Dana Ferguson, “Judge Approves Auction to Pay Back Westerhuis Debts,” that Sioux Falls paper, 2016.08.18].
You can review the awesome list of loot here. Then head to Platte next month to get your bidding number, quash your queasiness, and help pay the lawyers.
South Dakota needs an independent ethics commission to ensure oversight so vote “YES” on Initiative #22 in November. While you’re at it vote against the majority party that controlled government during the era of the EB-5 and GEAR UP scandals. Yes, that would be the Republicans.