Castaic Activist Convicted of Elder Abuse

Edwin Seth Brown, a longtime Santa Clarita Valley activist, has been convicted of bilking an 86-year-old Saugus widow out of much of her life savings and could be sentenced to as much as six years in state prison.

A Superior Court jury convicted Brown, 45, on Wednesday of one count of elder abuse, but acquitted him of a misdemeanor count of grand theft of property.

Judge Ronald Coen will sentence Brown on April 3.

Brown, a former Castaic Town Council member and the town’s 1994 Man of the Year, was freed on bail in July after his arrest on suspicion of swindling Olive Ruby out of $250,000 in 1992. After Wednesday’s verdict, he was taken to a county jail in downtown Los Angeles to await sentencing.

The jury deliberated for three days before reaching a verdict. Robert Schwartz, an attorney for Brown, called the verdict “an outrage” and said the jury of 10 whites and two Asians acted out of bias against Brown, who is black and gay.

“We just flat-out won the case,” Schwartz said. “There’s no way they could have made that decision based on the evidence.”

Deputy Dist. Atty. Javan Artis could not be reached for comment Thursday.

Brown has been a leading figure in several unincorporated communities in northern Los Angeles County, doing charity work and assisting with various community improvement efforts. Most notably, he served as director of the Samuel Dixon Health Center, a low-cost clinic that provides health care to much of the impoverished section of Val Verde, a town of nearly 2,000 residents about five miles northwest of Santa Clarita.

Sheriff’s detectives said Brown pocketed money that Ruby had intended to go to one of the charities Brown works with. But Schwartz said the money constituted a personal gift and that before she died in December, Ruby expressed anger that Brown had been charged. Her survivors, however, testified against Brown.

Brown is also scheduled to stand trial in Van Nuys on April 1 in an unrelated fraud case in which he is charged with four felony counts related to falsifying court documents.

In that case, Brown is accused of crediting two friends with more court-imposed community service hours than they had completed at the Dixon clinic and attempting to mislead the court as to where the two men had done their work.

The district attorney alleges that the men spent some of their sentence time doing tasks at Brown’s home.