Police: Mom, 66, helped son, friend rob salesman
West Palm woman held on charges after April incident at her house.
WEST PALM BEACH — A 66-yearold West Palm Beach woman has been accused of helping her son and his friend arrange the robbery of a jewelry salesman in April.
Delia Torres was arrested Tuesday, more than seven months after the incident, and faces charges of aggravated battery and robbery with a firearm.
West Palm Beach police say she helped lure the salesman to a meeting April 21 at her home on Palm Beach Lakes Boulevard and talked about the robbery with her son in recorded calls at the Palm Beach County Jail, where he has been in custody since April 28.
In one conversation, which was translated from Spanish, Torres’ son, Eliot Valdez, asked Torres for favors including getting rid of “a piece of iron” — which police in a report called slang for a gun.
“Get rid of it. Disappear it. You know where, right,” a transcription of the conversation quotes Valdez saying.
“The blackish one?” it quotes Torres as saying.
“Yes. Throw it where people
drown before dark.”
Judge Dina Keever-Agrama on Wednesday ordered Torres held on $70,000 bail during a hearing at the jail, where Torres has been held since her arrest. She will be on in-house arrest if she makes bond. She also was ordered to have no contact with her son or with Carmen Virginia Pena, a second person arrested in the robbery.
Jack Fleischman, a West Palm Beach attorney who represented Torres in court by telephone, said there was no evidence of her involvement in the robbery beyond her presence at the crime scene.
Valdez and Pena were arrested shortly after the April 21 incident. According to the report, the jewelry salesman told police he met with Torres, whom he knew from church, and Pena at Torres’ home, but when he arrived, a masked man held a gun to his back and demanded a duffel bag that contained about $30,000 worth of jewelry, then pistol-whipped him after they struggled for the weapon.
Police say the victim also told them that Torres gave Valdez car keys after he told her to do so, and that Pena told them she kicked the duffel toward the robber. The police report quotes Torres during the initial investigation as saying she was afraid for her life when the suspect asked for her keys.
Pena, whom jail records say is out on bond, was arrested after her fingerprints were found on the transaction slips for pawned jewelry that the victim identified as his. Police say she pawned more than 30 pieces of jewelry in the days after the robbery.
“You never get things pawned. Never!” the telephone-call transcript quotes Valdez telling Torres in Spanish about Pena pawning the jewelry.