How a doctor’s note landed an ex-L.A. Trade Tech Foundation director in jail

The doctor’s letter filed with the court had a simple message: His patient should avoid manual labor for her community service.

Jiah “Rhea” Chung, who had been ordered to pick up trash for Caltrans as punishment for embezzling from the Los Angeles Trade Technical College Foundation, was “undergoing a medical evaluation of her heart and lung condition and intolerance to physical labor,” the doctor’s note said.

“Please restrict her exposure to physical labor and sun — CalTrans activities,” continued the letter from Dr. Gregory L. Taylor II. At the bottom was the logo from Taylor’s place of work, Keck Medicine of USC.

There was just one problem: The doctor didn’t write the letter. Chung did.

At a court hearing last week, Chung, 46, told the judge that she wrote the note as a draft she intended to give her doctor to sign, but it wound up being filed in court, according to her attorney, Kenneth White.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Dana Aratani dismissed her excuse as unbelievable, saying that Chung — an avid golfer — had been caught deliberately trying to deceive the judge so she wouldn’t have to perform the arduous community service.

Superior Court Judge Frederick Wapner agreed and concluded that Chung had been trying to mislead him, the attorneys said. The judge sentenced her to 60 days in county jail, extended her probation by a year and doubled her community service to 120 days, though he ruled she did not have to serve them by cleaning freeways.

“That’s unacceptable to submit a false document to the court,” Aratani said. “In this case it warranted jail time.”

The dispute over the letter marked the latest twist in a public corruption case that began with allegations that Chung, the college foundation’s executive director, was improperly accepting thousands of dollars in unauthorized bonuses and expenses.

The payments, first reported by The Times, included a $5,000 initiation fee at the California Club, an annual membership fee of $2,300 for the L.A. Philharmonic and more than $9,000 on golf outings in two years. The foundation was established to help needy students at the downtown L.A. campus, which trains people in skills such as welding and fashion design, but was spending more on Chung’s salary and expenses than on scholarships to students, records showed.

The district attorney’s office alleged that Chung embezzled nearly $140,000 from 2009 to 2011. In 2013, prosecutors charged her with three counts each of misappropriation of public funds, forgery and embezzlement.

“Our students, all of them are really very poor,” said John McDowell, a foundation board member who attended the hearing. “Anybody who abuses their position to embezzle money or squander it is taking that money right out of the hands of students who really, really need it.”

As part of a deal reached with prosecutors, Chung pleaded guilty to one count of embezzlement and avoided jail time. She was sentenced to 60 days of work for the California Department of Transportation and three years of formal probation. She was also ordered to return $50,500, the amount she admitted taking, to the college’s foundation. The eight other charges were dropped.

After almost two years, Chung still hadn’t performed the Caltrans work, according to a probation report. When confronted by her probation officer, she said she had a medical condition and couldn’t do the labor. The officer asked for a doctor’s note, and Chung provided the letter, the probation report said.

During a September hearing, she brought the letter to court as part of a request to modify her sentence so she could perform a different type of community service, according to a transcript of the hearing. Her lawyer at the time, a deputy public defender, provided the note to the court.

When Aratani saw the letter, he said, he thought it looked suspicious. The doctor hadn’t signed the note or left a phone number, and the wording about Chung’s medical problems was vague.

At a hearing on Dec. 2, Aratani asked Chung whether she’s exposed to the sun when she plays golf.

“I’m in a cart with a roof,” he recalled her saying, “and I wear a hat.”

Taylor, the doctor, testified that Chung had explained her medical problems and asked him to write a letter but that he told her to draft a note so he could see what she wanted him to write, according to White. Taylor never saw the letter Chung created, the lawyer said.

The fiasco was the result of an honest miscommunication and Chung does suffer from medical problems that cause faintness and dizziness, White said.

“She did ultimately present two letters to the court from other doctors who indicated this was a legitimate cause for concern,” White said.

Taylor initially agreed to an interview with The Times, but a spokeswoman for Keck Medicine of USC called to cancel, saying the center’s policy was to grant interviews that focused only on the clinical work of physicians.

The foundation’s McDowell called Chung’s defense “rather lame.”

“That was obviously not true and the judge knew it,” he said.

The judge ordered Chung to surrender next month.

Aratani and McDowell said the judge had one more instruction for Chung: not to show up with a doctor’s note saying she was too sick to go to jail.

alene.tchekmedyian@latimes.com

Follow me on Twitter @AleneTchek

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