Woman accused of trashing Donegal bed & breakfast: ‘It was actually shocking’

DONEGAL TOWNSHIP, Pa. — A woman from Louisville is on the run and facing charges after police say she ransacked a bed and breakfast she was hired to manage.

Dave Smalley has been the co-owner of Baneberry Meadows for the last three years.

He lives in Tennessee, but his nephew and nephew’s wife were managing the place.

When the couple moved away, he started looking for a new management team with the intent to eventually sell the business.

He thought he found a good one.

“The presentation that they did sounded very, very good. They appeared to be very educated, and the background they presented seemed compatible,” Smalley told Channel 11′s Andrew Havranek.

Everything was going well for the first few weeks.

Then, Smalley got a concerning call from a guest.

“We are on-site, and the place is locked up, it looks like it’s been abandoned,” Smalley said the guest told them.

The new management team was an apparent scam.

Smalley canceled reservations for the next few weeks and came in from Tennessee to see what was going on.

He found the lawn not mowed, glasses set up with more than 200 shotgun shells scattered through the yard like target practice, and the antique bar worth at least $10,000 ripped out of the floor and missing.

The only things left were screws, and the hookups for water and electricity.

“When you saw this, what was going through your mind?” Havranek asked Smalley.

“Oh my gosh! How could anybody actually do that? It was actually shocking,” he said.

Smalley said they even found plates and other items from the bed and breakfast for sale on Facebook Marketplace.

The stolen items have not been recovered.

Now, police say they are searching for Samantha Nicole Brown. They’ve charged her with two felonies.

“It’s just a matter of time before they catch her,” Smalley said.

The bed and breakfast is reopened with new management. They say they are looking to build a new bar, but said it’s hard to replace history.

“You can recreate something, but it doesn’t have the same value,” said Rachel Hallas, the new Operating Manager.

She said she’s excited and invested in the bed and breakfast, and is looking forward to meeting new guests.

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