Woman posed as relative of young Chicago homicide victims to collect tax refunds, COVID-19 stimulus payments, feds say
A South Side woman has been hit with federal fraud charges alleging she obtained death certificates of dozens of young Chicago murder victims by claiming she was a relative and later used their stolen identities to collect thousands of dollars in tax refunds and COVID-19 stimulus payments.
Among the victims of the scam allegedly perpetrated by Katrina Pierce was Amari Brown, a 7-year-old boy fatally shot in the Humboldt Park neighborhood on July 4, 2015, according to a criminal complaint made public Thursday in U.S. District Court charging Pierce with wire fraud and aggravated identity theft.
The 34-page complaint alleged Pierce had posed as Amari’s aunt when requesting his death certificate in 2019, then used the stolen information to file a fraudulent tax return that garnered a $4,400 refund check from the IRS.
Pierce was arrested Tuesday and appeared before U.S. District Judge Young Kim, who ordered her held in custody pending trial, court records show. A preliminary hearing was scheduled for next Tuesday.
Pierce’s court-appointed attorney could not immediately be reached for comment.
According to the complaint, the fraud was first detected in November 2019 by an employee at the Cook County Vital Records Bureau, who noticed that Pierce had submitted requests for four death certificates in one day, claiming to be the sister of each of the decedents even though they had different last names.
A check of the bureau’s database revealed that Pierce had requested a total of 37 death certificates in 2019 alone, and succeeded in obtaining 26 of them, according to the complaint. All of them were for homicide victims ranging in age from 2 to 22 years old, mostly from Chicago’s South and West sides, the complaint stated.
In January 2020, IRS agents went to the two-flat listed as the return address in Pierce’s applications. In a trash can behind the building, they found “discarded handwritten notes listing the names of deceased persons” as well as the manner in which they died, such as “shot,” “stabbed,” or “fall,” the complaint alleged.
Images of some of the notes included in the charges showed the words “try to rob” scribbled next to the name of one 19-year-old murder victim.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates
