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Senior News Editor since 2004
ME office investigator accused of stealing hundreds from dead people in Florida, NYC
The investigator is accused of transferring the funds into his own accounts, as well as to a woman he was dating.
nypost.com
ME office investigator accused of stealing hundreds from dead people in Florida, NYC
By
Social Links for Katherine Donlevy
Published Feb. 2, 2024, 10:06 p.m. ET
A medical examiner office worker lined his pockets with hundreds of dollars he stole from the people whose deaths he was tasked with investigating in Florida and New York City.
Darrell Fernando Reid Jr., 38, was arrested last month for allegedly swiping multiple bank cards while working at two medical examiner offices over the past several years, according to court records obtained by the Miami Herald.
He allegedly used the information to transfer funds directly into his own account using Cash App.
Reid’s alleged scheme came crashing down in October, when he had only been working as an investigator with the Broward County Medical Examiner’s Office for nine months.
The sticky-fingered employee is accused of jotting down a dead man’s Bank of America card information while responding with nine other employees to a condominium in Coral Springs, where the card owner had lay decomposed for two weeks.
The man’s daughter quickly discovered three “suspicious” transactions that were made after her father’s death — all of which were $150 Cash App payments made by Reid to a woman he was dating, prosecutors allege.
The first payment was lodged just 90 minutes after investigators locked the front door to the condo and handed off the key to the deceased man’s daughter.
The bank card was also notably found by the daughter sitting out on the kitchen counter, despite investigators documenting it as one of several contents found inside a wallet during the death examination.
A subsequent investigation found that Reid had allegedly swiped cards from at least three other dead victims.
Reid was on the scene for the death investigations of two different people in November and December 2022, one in Broward County and the other in New York City, where he had been working as an investigator for the Office of Chief Medical Examiner, the arrest warrant states.
While he was not on the death investigation scene of the third victim, Reid is accused of lifting the debit card information of the victim while rifling through the Broward County case’s files.
From 2020 until November of last year, Reid packed his Cash App with 27 payment sources, including 25 debit and credit cards and two Cash App cards, though it’s not clear how many were allegedly swiped.
“An investigation into the account holders of the additional cards is presently ongoing and subpoenas have been served to multiple banking institutions,” Reid’s warrant states.
Reid was charged with three counts of fraudulently using the personal identification information of a deceased person and fraudulent use of a credit card.
He resigned from the Broward County Medical Examiner’s Office Friday after serving as an investigator since April 2023.
The Post has reached out to the New York Office of Chief Medical Examiner regarding Reid’s employment.