Murdaugh accused of stealing from deaf man Hakeem Pinckney
In South Carolina, there is a huge criminal case involving Alex Murdaugh, who is an attorney from a wealthy and powerful family that has held the solicitor or district attorney’s office in the southern part of the state for over 80 years. Murdaugh is jailed on over 50 indictments of defrauding many people out of millions of dollars and is a person of interest in the murders of his wife and son in June.
News reports said one of Murdaugh’s victims is a deaf man named Hakeem Pinckney, who was in a serious car accident in 2009 that caused him to become a quadriplegic and dependent on a ventilator to breathe. He later died in 2011 at a nursing home when his ventilator became unplugged.
An attorney representing the Pinckney family, Justin Bamberg, said Murdaugh stole about $1 million from Hakeem and the Pinckney family through a web of schemes that involved Murdaugh’s friends, one whom worked as an attorney and another as a bank CEO.
Let’s go back a bit. A source told “The Daily Moth” that Hakeem graduated from the South Carolina School for the Deaf and the Blind in 2009 and was on his way to SCSDB with his mother to watch a volleyball game when the crash happened. Another source told “The Daily Moth” that a tire blew out, causing the crash. The mother, Pamela, was the driver and was also seriously injured.
The Post and Courier reported that Hakeem’s cousin and sister were also passengers in the vehicle. Murdaugh represented the Pinckney siblings and their cousin in a lawsuit against the manufacturer of the car’s tires, Michelin North America, Inc.
FitsNews.com explained that Murdaugh sent Pamela, the mother, to another attorney named Cory Fleming and “convinced her that he was the best person to represent her as they collectively sued a tire company.” Fleming is friends with Murdaugh.
Murdaugh then convinced Pamela to hire a banker to handle the financials of the lawsuit and pointed her towards the CEO of Palmetto State Bank to act as the “conservator over both Pamela and Hakeem Pinckney’s cases.” The CEO is also friends with Murdaugh.
FitsNews.com showed an image of a settlement check for over $300,000 that was written directly to the bank for Hakeem’s crash. The Pinckney family said they never got a penny from it. The CEO of the bank was paid a $60,000 conservatorship fee.
The Pinckney family did receive monthly settlement payments, but they did not realize there was more money out there that was entitled to them.
[Sponsored Video from Convo: https://www.convorelay.com/download ]
FitsNews.com explained that after the crash, Hakeem was “transferred from the ICU to a nursing home” but that his ventilator was somehow unplugged, and it caused him to die. In 2014, Pamela hired an attorney who worked in the same law firm as Murdaugh’s to file a wrongful death lawsuit against the nursing home, and it seems like the same thing happened — a portion of the settlement money was stolen.
Bamberg told The Post and Courier that he estimates that between $800,000 and $1 million was missing from the family’s settlements. Bamberg said there were very similar fraud cases that also involved Murdaugh’s attorney friend and banker. Bamberg is planning to file a civil suit on behalf of the Pinckney family and other alleged victims.
The aforementioned bank CEO was fired on January 7 after news reports emerged of his possible involvement with Murdaugh’s alleged schemes.
The Post and Courier said Murdaugh is currently in jail on a $7 million bond and faces many state charges over the web of thefts of $6.2 million from his former clients. He also faces insurance fraud charges because he confessed that he hired a hitman to shoot him in the head so there would be a $10 million life insurance payout for his son, and this is after Murdaugh said he found his wife and another son shot to death on a large property they own. There are several other cases of deceased people that are somehow tied to Murdaugh.
So it’s a lot of things swirling around Alex Murdaugh, and we see that it tragically involves a deaf person who is no longer with us — Hakeem Pinckney. We’ll see how the case unfolds and what more comes out of this.
https://news.yahoo.com/alex-murdaugh-sc-bank-ceo-134824886.html