Insurance lies in sons’ deaths result in 212 years in prison
A 46-year-old Hawthorne man was sentenced to 212 years in federal prison on Thursday for fraudulently obtaining $260,000 from insurance policies after, authorities say, he purposely drove off of the San Pedro wharf to drown two severely autistic sons strapped in car seats.
He also was ordered to pay $260,000-plus in restitution in the case, which was investigated by the FBI and the IRS.
Prosecutors, who successfully recommended the maximum sentence, said Ali Elmezayen also intended for his wife or domestic partner at the time, Rabab Diab, to die, noting she wasn’t a strong swimmer. Court documents de
scribe their relationship both ways.
The sentencing stems from the October 2019 conviction of Elmezayen for 14 charges that include mail and wire fraud, aggravated identity theft and money laundering. He had taken out life insurance policies on his wife and children and claimed his sons’ deaths were an accident in order to collect, prosecutors have said.
The April 9, 2015, crash killed Elhassan, 13, and Abdelkarim, 8. Diab escaped the car and was rescued by a witness. Elmezayen did not make an attempt to help Diab or the boys, prosecutors said.
The couple’s third son, Elhussein, was at a camp.
Prior to the crash, prosecutors said, Elmezayen posed as Diab when he called insurance companies to ensure they would not contest claims made more than two years after the policies were made. Two calls were played during the trial. The crash occurred two years and 12 days after the last of the eight policies was initiated, prosecutors said.
Neither Elmezayen, nor his public defender, Cuauhtemoc Ortega, spoke during Thursday’s sentencing hearing.
During the trial, Ortega argued that Elmezayen took out the policies because he suffered from hypochondria and anxiety about the future.
Elmezayen was struggling for money when he crafted the idea to take out eight accidental death and life insurance policies, for $6 million, from July 2012 to March 2013, prosecutors said. He paid $6,000 per year for the policies, even though he told investigators he annually made less than $30,000.
Prosecutors painted a picture of an abusive man
Divers emerge from the water as debris believed to be from a car floats to the surface where a car went off a pier and into the water in Los Angeles’ San Pedro harbor district in April 2015. Los Angeles prosecutors have charged a Hawthorne man with murder in the episode. He is accused of driving his family off the pier, killing his two autistic sons.
unhappy with his marriage and his three children, and that he was writing letters to a new love interest before he plunged the family car into the murky water.
After receiving the money from the policies, which were in Diab’s name, Elmezayen bought a home on the Nile River and a boat in Egypt, prosecutors said.
“You disrespected your sons by treating their graves like a bank account for your low-life family,” said Elhussein Diab, who is now 20 years old and was the eldest of the couple’s three children, in a statement to the court. “You don’t deserve any connection to this world, because you took two innocent boys from it.”
Witnesses to the crash said Diab came up to the ocean’s surface, screaming for help. They said Elmezayen, who escaped through the open driver’s side window, swam toward a ladder but didn’t do anything to help his wife or children, the pair still strapped into car seats.
During the federal trial, a first responder broke down on the witness stand when recounting his efforts to
save the boys, Judge John Walter recounted Thursday before handing out the sentence.
Walter called Elmezayen the “ultimate phony and skillful liar … and is nothing more than a greedy and brutal killer.”
During trial, the judge noted, Elmezayen was “quick to cry on cue during what I believe were crucial times, but he immediately turned it off when it seemed to no longer fit the image he was trying to portray.”
Elmezayen lied under oath about his ability to understand English, Walter said, and he tried to get family members to lie and say he had given money obtained from the policies to charity.
“(His) only real regret is that he got caught,” the judge said.
The family had eaten dinner at an Inglewood restaurant before Elmezayen proposed they head to the port to walk along the ocean and buy fish, Rabab Diab would tell police, according to court documents. She was watching a big boat in the ocean when she felt Elmezayen accelerating toward the
water, she said.
Prosecutors have said that Elmezayen has given numerous accounts as to why he drove off of the wharf, including that parking spaces were too close to the edge, the car’s brake system didn’t work, and an evil presence overtook him.
While seated in an interview room, Elmezayen, in a recorded conversation, asked Rabab Diab in Arabic what she had told police. After she asked if the kids were at the hospital, he told her, according to court documents, “May God compensate us for the kids. … May God give us better than them.”
His federal sentencing paves the way for his case in Los Angeles County Superior Court, which focuses on the allegation that he purposely drove off of the pier with his family. He faces two counts of murder and one for attempted murder.
The Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office initially declined to file the murder charges, citing insufficient evidence in December 2017, but it changed course in July 2019 after further investigation by Los Angeles police.