Three Face Forgery, Other Charges For Allegedly Duping 87 Year Old Woman Into Signing Away Home, Using Straw Buyer To Pocket $775+K In Home Equity

In Pomona, California, the Los Angeles County District Attorney announced last week:

• A church bishop and two others are due to be arraigned Monday on six felony counts each for allegedly duping an 87-year-old Claremont woman into signing over the grant deed to her home. [...] Defendant Leroy Dowd, 71, is charged [...] with two counts of grand theft, two counts of offering a false or forged instrument for recording, one count of identity theft and one count of forgery. Bessie Mae Moore, 61, and Alexander Trevino, 31, both of Los Angeles, also are charged in the complaint. The charges carry aggravated white-collar crime and excessive-taking enhancements.

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• Dowd – a self-ordained bishop who operated the now-defunct Triumph Church of God [...] in Los Angeles – met the victim through church in December 2006. He allegedly told the elderly woman that he could help her secure widow’s benefits from Medicare and Social Security. Under this guise, he allegedly tricked her into signing over the grant deed to her $800,000 home, which was paid in full.

• Eight days later, Dowd sold the house to Moore, who is believed to have posed as a straw buyer. Moore obtained financing through Trevino, a loan officer at MortgageQwest in Glendale. Trevino allegedly falsified the financial information in Moore’s loan application and was able to obtain 100 percent financing. At closing, Dowd allegedly walked away with more than $775,000, prosecutors said.

For more, see the LA County DA press release: Church Bishop, Two Others Charged In Theft of Elderly Woman’s Home.