A jury on Monday acquitted a Shakopee health care consultant who prosecutors accused of helping his girlfriend allegedly embezzle more than $400,000 from St. Catherine University while she worked as the dean of the St. Paul school’s nursing program.

Jurors deliberated less than four hours in Ramsey County District Court before finding Juan Ramon Bruce, 57, not guilty of six counts of aiding and abetting theft by swindle, which prosecutors filed against him in May.

His girlfriend, Laura Jean Fero, who was St. Catherine’s dean of nursing from June 2019 through Aug. 28, 2023, faces the same six counts. Fero, 55, has a pretrial hearing scheduled for Aug. 13.

LLaura Jean Fero (Courtesy of the Ramsey County Sheriff’s Office)

“Our position from the time of charging is that (Bruce) was not guilty, that there was no crime committed here,” his attorney, Debra Hilstrom, said after the verdict. “And in the event that there was a crime, that he didn’t commit it.”

The charges against Bruce said that investigators determined his company “pretended to be a marketing company, but its actual purpose was to obtain misappropriated funds from St. Catherine.”

“We said from the very beginning that Mr. Bruce did the work that he was hired to do,” Hilstrom said. “And so the jury listened to all the facts and found him not guilty. And we’re very pleased about that.”

The prosecution called a dozen witnesses over seven days of testimony and “we were able to get our case in completely on our cross-examination,” Hilstrom said. “We believed that the facts as they were coming in were clear that there wasn’t a crime here committed by Mr. Bruce.”

Bruce, who had been jailed in lieu of $100,000 bail since his May arrest, was released from custody Monday.

They met on a dating website

Ferro left her job at St. Catherine in August for one as the dean of nursing and chief academic nurse at AdventHealth University in Orlando, Fla. It was then that St. Catherine officials discovered missing funds and conducted an internal investigation, the charges against her say. The university reported its findings to St. Paul police in late November.

Fero entered into contracts with Bruce and his company, JB & Associates LLC., between August 2020 and August 2023, the charges say. A St. Paul Police Department review of financial records showed his company received six payments from St. Catherine, totaling $412,644.

Bruce claimed “every penny on his taxes … and those are just not the kinds of things that you usually see when someone is alleged to have committed a crime such as this,” Hilstrom said Monday.

The charges against Fero say she sent an email to Bruce in October 2020 where she referenced meeting him on a dating website. Several emails she sent one day in July 2022 mentioned how they have traveled together to many places over the previous two years and how “she loves him deeply, she can’t imagine life without him.”

The charges also allege a review of Fero’s university credit card showed she racked up $26,191 in expenses — airfare, rental cars, hotels and airport parking — for trips with Bruce to Miami, Atlanta and Phoenix in 2021, Cancun in 2022 and Orlando last year.

The investigation found additional emails indicating that Fero helped Bruce with some of the reports he was providing to the university to receive his contract funds, the charges allege.

In an interview with police, Fero initially said she met Bruce from a “cold call” to St. Catherine about medical supplies and that they were not in a relationship prior to the university contracting with him. Fero later said she had met him on the dating website Elitesingles.com and that she believed the relationship did not constitute a conflict of interest.

Fero admitted to “editing” documents that Bruce submitted to St. Catherine, the charges say.

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