Who is Ali F Elmezayen? LA man fakes accident to kill autistic sons, 13 and 8, for insurance, gets 212-year jail
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA: The city of Los Angeles was left horrified on April 9, 2015, when a man, Ali F Elmezayen, drove his wife and two autistic sons off a wharf in the San Pedro harbor district, to defraud insurance companies. Elmezayen's sons, 13-year-old Elhassan and eight-year-old Abdelkarim, both of whom suffered from autism died during the incident, while his ex-wife, Rehab Diab managed to escape, despite not knowing how to swim.
Elmezayen drove the car off the wharf while he escaped through the driver's window and swam quickly. Diab managed to make it out alive as well, thanks to a fisherman who threw a flotation device at her. The children, however, were strapped to their seats and drowned. On Thursday, March 11, he was sentenced to 212 years in prison.
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Elmezayen applied and acquired more than $3 million in life and accidental death insurance coverage for his family with eight different companies. Elmezayen, who is an Egyptian native with no legal status in the USA and a reported income of less than $30,000 per year, paid annual premiums of $6,000 towards these policies. He began purchasing insurance policies after a Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceeding. After the deaths of his sons, he collected almost $262,000.
According to a legal proceeding on Thursday, March 11, United States District Judge John F Walter sentenced him to 212 years in prison, the maximum sentence allowed by the law, on account of the “vicious and callous nature of his crimes”. The judge also added that "he is the ultimate phony and a skillful liar… and is nothing more than a greedy and brutal killer."
"He murdered his two autistic children, letting two innocent young boys die an extraordinarily painful death while strapped in their (car) seats," Judge Walter told the court. "It's undisputed that death by drowning is a painful way to die. I can only imagine the horror they must have experienced as they struggled to get out of their seats ... as their lungs filled up with water," he said, according to a report.
Apart from his sentence, he was also ordered to pay $261,751 in restitution to the insurance companies that he defrauded. The trial took place in October 2019 and lasted for nine days, where a federal jury found Elmezayen guilty of four counts of mail fraud, four counts of wire fraud, one count of aggravated identity theft, and five counts of money laundering.
Elmezayen often contacted the insurance companies and even pretended to be his ex-wife, under whose name he acquired some of the policies, to verify its status and to confirm if there would be a payout in case an accidental death occurred. He also called and confirmed with two agencies that they would not investigate claims made after two years of the policy purchase period.
The FBI and IRS Criminal Investigation investigated the case and he was subsequently arrested in November 2018. He has been in federal custody since.