Woman Arrested in Fraud; Claimed Quake Killed Kin

A former Spring Valley woman was arrested Wednesday in Los Angeles County on suspicion of bilking two insurance companies of $144,000 by claiming that a non-existent sister was killed in the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, officials said.

Sorina Claudine Vernon, 39, was arrested by California Department of Insurance investigators at a Diamond Bar residence where she had recently moved, concluding a nine-month investigation; the agency had been alerted to “discrepancies” in a death claim filed by Vernon, chief investigator Ronald Warthen said.

Sister Allegedly Died

Vernon, a naturalized American citizen from Haiti, took out three insurance policies worth $164,000 under the alias of Collete Butler and then, using her real name, claimed Butler had been killed at the Regis Hotel in Mexico City during the Sept. 19, 1985, earthquake, Warthen said.

The San Diego County district attorney’s office assisted in the case, which will be prosecuted in San Diego because it was filed when Vernon lived in Spring Valley, Warthen said.

She was booked at the Los Angeles County Jail in the City of Industry on suspicion of three counts of insurance fraud, two counts of grand theft and one count of attempted grand theft, said Cliff Dobrin, a San Diego County assistant district attorney.

Warthen said Standard Security Life Insurance Co., of New York City, paid Vernon $104,000 and Old American Insurance Co., of Kansas City, Mo., paid $40,000 before the state investigators were called in by an Omaha firm that became suspicious of birth and death certificates.

“The birth certificate filed was determined to be fraudulent. . . . The death certificate (from Mexico) was fraudulent also,” Warthen said, adding that handwriting analysis determined that signatures under the names of Vernon and Butler were written by the same person.

Case a ‘Jigsaw Puzzle’

Dobrin described the Vernon case as “a jigsaw puzzle made up of 400 tiny pieces that together don’t necessarily make a picture.”

“The really unusual thing about this case is that it was solved,” Dobrin said. “It is a real problem (determining the validity) of death claims outside the country.”

Warthen said this is first case he knows of involving a possible wrongful death claim stemming from the Mexico City quake.

Bail for Vernon is $150,000.

She is scheduled to be brought to San Diego County for a preliminary hearing later next week, Dobrin said.