Woman, 39, Arrested in $144,000 Insurance Fraud on Quake ‘Death’

State insurance investigators arrested a Diamond Bar woman Wednesday for allegedly bilking $144,000 from two insurance companies for claims against a non-existent sister purportedly killed in the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, officials said.

The arrest of Sorina Claudine Vernon, 39, ended a nine-month investigation by California Department of Insurance agents, who had been alerted to “discrepencies” in a death claim filed by Vernon, said the department’s chief investigator, Ronald Warthen.

Vernon, a naturalized American citizen from Haiti, allegedly 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 temblor, 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 the county, Warthen said. Vernon had moved to Diamond Bar recently from Spring Valley, he said.

She was booked at a Los Angeles County jail facility in the City of Industry for investigation of three counts of insurance fraud, two counts of grand theft and one count of attempted grand theft, said Assistant San Diego County Dist. Atty. Cliff Dobrin. Bail was set at $150,000.

Warthen said a New York City insurance company paid Vernon $104,000 and a Kansas City Missouri company 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.

Handwriting analysis also determined that signatures under the name of Vernon and Butler name were penned by the same person, Warthen said.

Cliff Dobrin, a San Diego County assistant district attorney, described the 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. It is a real problem (determining the validity) of death claims outside the country.”