Round Rock ISD Employee Arrested

A Round Rock School District employee was arrested after police said he admitted to stealing about 100 laptop computers from a district warehouse then sold the computers on Craigslist.

Robert Clopton, 50, is charged with a state jail felony theft. District officials said he worked at the warehouse for 18 years.

"His main responsibility was to intake our computers that are being no longer used at the campus level and go ahead and determine which ones could be sold in our store that we have opened to the public," said RRISD spokeswoman JoyLynn Occhiuzzi.

FOX 7 News was allowed into the warehouse Tuesday afternoon. The area where Clopton worked has now been gated and locked. The district said Clopton found a loophole in the receiving procedures.

"He misappropriated and sold about 100 dell laptops that were either obsolete or not of any use to the school district but still worth money to the district," said Round Rock Police spokesman Eric Poteet.

Poteet said Clopton admitted setting aside a pile of laptops during the unloaded on a shipment. Poteet said Clopton then manipulated the asset logs to hide his tracks. Investigators said Clopton loaded the laptop computers into a truck through a side or back door at the warehouse and left.

"It's taxpayer money," said Occhiuzzi, "The impact is that we had equipment that was stolen from the school district. We could have resold it."

"As long as he had a way to sell it. There's a way for us to track it back to him," said Poteet.

Poteet said the police department received a tip that Clopton was selling the laptops for about $50-$150 on Craigslist. Police tracked the phone number Clopton listed on the ad that led back to him.

"Absolutely stupid," said Poteet. "People think that they can have a cloak of anonymity on the internet. They commit a crime, that crime extends to cyberspace, and they think that that is going to prevent them from getting caught. They're wrong."

District officials said the laptops could have been sold for about $10,000.

"That money could have been put back into general funds which could have eventually gone back to the classroom," said Occhiuzzi.

Occhiuzzi said the district will now review the receiving procedures at the warehouse to make certain the tight security that's now in place isn't breached again.