Alejandro Díaz Torriente, 67 years old, was sentenced on Wednesday to 20 years in prison and an additional ten years of probation for financially exploiting a 94-year-old woman in Miami-Dade, posing as her son to take possession of her home and savings, according to the State Attorney's Office of the county.
The victim lived alone in her house in the El Portal neighborhood — purchased in 1980 and valued at over 600,000 dollars — when she was declared legally incompetent in 2021, at which point a daughter of her neighbor was designated as her legal guardian by the court.
Díaz Torriente, who had met the woman around 2020 as a mere acquaintance, gradually earned her trust until he began to introduce himself as her son to doctors, caregivers, and others, referring to her as "mom" in every interaction.
That impersonation allowed him to block the legal guardian's access to the elderly woman, move into the residence, and change the locks.
The financial scheme was also devised: the accused redirected the woman's social security benefits to an unknown bank account, opened his own accounts to defraud her of approximately $20,000 in cash, and submitted a fraudulent document in which he was added as a co-owner with survivorship rights over the property.
It was precisely the legal guardian who uncovered the fraud by detecting that the social security money was being diverted, which triggered a four-month investigation by the Elderly and Vulnerable Adult Exploitation Task Force (EVA) of the Prosecutor's Office, culminating in the arrest of Díaz Torriente in November 2023.
The charges for which he was found guilty included organized fraud, exploitation of an elderly or disabled person, and grand theft.
The Miami-Dade State Attorney, Katherine Fernandez Rundle, emphasized the work of Assistant State Attorney Sara Imm and the EVA team, and firmly warned: “This case sends a clear message to those who seek to leave our elderly in misery and abandonment: we will not tolerate this kind of ruthless crime against our vulnerable residents.”
The case of Díaz Torriente is not an isolated incident in the county. In April of this year, a mother and her son faced charges in Miami for exploiting an elderly woman over three years using fraudulent credit cards, and in July 2025 a Cuban pleaded guilty to stealing more than $800,000 from an elderly person in Panama.
Since its establishment in May 2022, the EVA Task Force has presented dozens of criminal cases and assisted hundreds of vulnerable adults in Miami-Dade, under state legislation that imposes penalties of up to first-degree felony when losses exceed $100,000.
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