Murder suspect charged with Indiana unemployment fraud

A man awaiting trial in connection with a 2003 Gary murder was charged Wednesday with defrauding Indiana’s unemployment program.

Robert Alan Orosz, 58, was told to repay $6,300 for benefits and penalties collected from July 2020 to March 2021.

He finished paying it back two days before he was charged, Detective Nicholas Wardrip, a Hobart detective working with the FBI’s Gang Response Investigative Team wrote.

Orosz is charged with theft and welfare fraud, both level 6 felonies.

“There are so many scams going on and people are getting $10 to $15 to $20,000 and he wasn’t worried about it,” he told his girlfriend in a jailhouse call, according to court documents.

Wardrip notified the Indiana Department of Workforce Development, who paused Orosz’s payments, because people who were incarcerated were not eligible, it said.

In March 2021, Orosz posted bond on the murder charge. He had not replayed the money or appealed by May, a claims investigator told Wardrip.

Orosz was charged July 17, 2020, with the March 13, 2003, murder of Kevin Pratchett, 48.

Known then as “Painter Bob,” Orosz was a customer accused of cutting his drug dealer’s throat in a 2003 Gary slaying, court documents allege. Witnesses, who said he owed money, and DNA matches led to an arrest.

Another murder defendant, James McGhee, was charged in September with fraudulently collecting $20,000 from the federal government’s coronavirus paycheck protection program while on house arrest.

Wardrip investigated both fraud cases, according to court records.