REDWOOD CITY — Attorneys are working out trial details for a former Caltrain manager who has been charged with misspending agency funds to build himself a secret apartment at a train station, and is expected to be challenged by his one-time co-defendant who has agreed to testify for the prosecution.
Joseph Vincent Navarro, 67, faces a felony count of misusing public funds in San Mateo County Superior Court, and was scheduled for a trial setting hearing Friday. He was charged in March 2024 and waived a preliminary hearing in August, setting the stage for a trial this year.
His former co-defendant, Seth Andrew Worden, 62, reached a deal with the district attorney’s office in which he pleaded no contest Jan. 21 to a misdemeanor embezzlement charge and agreed to testify against Navarro.
Worden could be sentenced as early as April 16 and, provided his testimony satisfies prosecutors, would face no more than five months in county jail and be required to pay $8,144 to restore the embezzled funds.
Navarro, who now lives in Pennsylvania and is out of custody on $25,000 bail, has pressed on toward trial, with his attorney previously telling this news organization that the criminal charge is “overstated” and that he did nothing wrong. If convicted, Navarro faces a maximum sentence of four years in prison.
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Prosecutors allege that between 2019 and 2020, Navarro, when he was a deputy director for Caltrain, worked with Worden and approved $42,000 in building expenses to convert office space into a small apartment inside the Burlingame train station, a historical landmark built in 1894. Worden built himself similar living quarters inside the Millbrae train station.
The criminal charges also allege Navarro and Worden ensured that no invoice related to the clandestine construction surpassed $3,000, a threshold that would have required further authorization from Caltrain and TransAmerica Services Inc., the company that employed Worden.
Worden drew suspicion first, in 2020, after employees discovered the converted space, according to authorities. The transit agency reportedly learned about Navarro’s apartment in Burlingame from an an anonymous tip in 2022.
Navarro was fired after being confronted with the tip and reportedly admitted to “occasionally using the station as his residence,” but prosecutors contend that it was his primary residence. Both dwellings have long since been cleared out and restored to working space.
