Do you know who you married?

Wednesday afternoon our offices get a call asking for an investigator to go to an attorney clients office and speak with their client. We go out to the office and are met by an attorney and a young lady. The young lady starts telling a story, she has been married for approximately 7 years to a man that we will call John Smith. Through time she and John Smith have accumulated property and have also had children. Well in recent years my client and John Gonzales have had a falling out. He all of a sudden has become distant and extremely secretive. While cleaning she happens to find some documentation that indicates that her husband John Smith may be a different person name John Brown. She sees other documents that are property records and they show the name John Brown on them as well, they also have her name attached as his wife. The client confronts her husband who gets mad and an argument takes place, the client leaves her residence with her child. The husband changes the locks, closes up bank accounts and now has completely shut my client out. The husband does call to see the children, he sees them and takes them and refuses to give them back. The police are called, and the children are taken back home. The client's attorney advises that they need proof that the husband has falsely documented himself and acquired property through fraudulent means. The client happens to get a copy of the social security number that her husband was using and also the recorded property documents. A quick search of the social security number through our databases shows the clients husbands fake name with their shared real address, as well as some other properties, but it also shows someone else with a completely different name, this person who we will call Steve White also lives in the state where the social security number was issued from and from his residence history has resided there for the majority of his life, my clients husband resides in California several states away and is from a different country. After conferring with the client and the attorney it was decided that contact should be made to number one verify our findings and number two see if Mr. White would be willing to swear an affidavit and possibly pursue our client's husband for fraud. A telephone call was placed and as it turned out Mr. Steve White was an attorney, he was shocked at our findings and after verifying some things on his own, was more than willing to swear out an affidavit. The clients husband also probably will be having some problems with immigration at the next court date. 

Morrow Detective Agency is a licensed private investigation firm located on the border of Ventura and Los Angeles, Ca in Simi Valley, CA. Morrow Detective Agency is capable of performing surveillance, process service, locates, background investigations, asset investigations, and more. Please feel free to visit our website at www.MorrowDetectiveAgency.com or give us a call at (805) 823-3540 and allow us to make your problem our solution!

Digging for gold

Trash digs, they aren't the most attractive part of this work, but they can be fruitful. We normally get this type of request for child custody related investigations. Lets say a person is trying to prove that the other parent likes to party, drinks a lot, or is not feeding their kids balanced meals. A trash dig can help validate that information. 

One particular case comes to mind that can be used as an example. We get a call from a client who is going through a custody issue, the Father of the children has a big drinking/drug problem, when he has custody of the kids he only feeds them fast food and junk food. After hearing the clients concerns we set a plan. First thing that needs to be determined is what day does the trash man come to pick up. It is illegal for anyone to walk onto a persons property and go through their trash, but once the trash is parked at the curb it is no longer on private property and therefor no longer considered property. A call to the local trash company and we are able to determine what day the trash is going to be curved, we also plan our efforts around the end of the visitation that the father has so that it will paint a more accurate picture of what goes on in the house. 

So the following Wednesday, we set our clocks for o dark thirty (it is easier to pick up trash at a time when everyone is sleeping) and made the necessary preparations. The following morning we get to the residence, a quick scan of the neighborhood is done to make sure that the closest neighbors are not up and about. We quickly photograph the residence, the vehicles parked in the driveway, the cans on the curb, all of this is done to establish that we are at the right residence and also that we are obtaining this information in a legal manner. As we are taking bags out of the trash cans, one happens to burst. Luckily we were prepared for this and placed the bags and its contents into a bigger, more secure bag. We go into the recycle can and see so many bottles that it would be almost impossible to grab them all without making a lot of noise, so we grab as many as we can and photograph the rest in the bin to help reaffirm our point. 

Where you take the bags is important, taking them to the office is not going to make your co-workers or bosses happy. We prefer to take them to a public park. We spread out a tarp, grab some sticks and start sifting through the findings. This particular dig shows that there is no produce, just a gallon of milk, and a ton of fast food bags. It also shows that there are quite a lot of prescription pill bottles with names that do not belong to the subject. The subject lives alone and these names are males names. We counted approximately 50 different bottles, everything from hard liquor to wine. Now this is the first dig, about three more in addition to this one, with basically the same type of findings and we were able to determine that there may be a lot of drinking going on and no cooking. The children who have told stories about witnessing their father in an alternate state of mind, have substantiated the suspicions of drinking and possible drug use.  Our client took this evidence to the court house, the father was mandated to get into a treatment program and to be tested before he has visitation with the children. 

Morrow Detective Agency is a licensed private investigation firm located on the border of Ventura and Los Angeles, Ca in Simi Valley, CA. Morrow Detective Agency is capable of performing surveillance, process service, locates, background investigations, asset investigations, and more. Please feel free to visit our website at www.MorrowDetectiveAgency.com or give us a call at (805) 823-3540 and allow us to make your problem our solution!

You need to know before you say I do.

A client calls and asks for us to conduct a background investigation, their daughter has gotten herself involved with a particular individual and she is now engaged to him. They want to know if he is a person of good character, has he been married before, if so what happened, can he support their daughter? The client provides us with the information that they know about the guy and we start our inquiries. We find out that the person is involved in his profession and appears to be growing in it. We find that he owns a house and has an audi that is paid off. So far this is the report that the client wants to hear. More information is discovered, the type of stuff that the client may have some concerns with. The man was married up until January of this year, he is rushing to get back on the saddle it seems, he has no children but his ex wife claims that he was not physically abusive but was mentally abusive and controlling, she alleges that he controlled all of the money and the finances and did not allow for her to make any decisions. We learn that the ex wife who was a nurse and making more then decent money had to run to her parents residence because she had no access to the accounts. Of course the male subject responds and he states that all of her allegations are in fact fabricated. The disposition of the case indicates that the Judge has awarded the man the property but he has to pay his ex wife 90k, the male subject also has to provide her an additional 100k from his retirement. He does not have to pay her alimony and she is not responsible for any of the accrued debt that they shared. A further inquiry with the ex wife is made and she stated that the male subject was unfaithful during their marriage and that she had caught him cheating and that was the final straw. Now I personally am not against people falling in love or moving forward with their lives, however in this situation one does wonder why would this person be so eager to get back in the drivers seat when he just finished a trip? Now the parents ( my clients) are going to approach their daughter with this information, they are flying out of state to see her and meet her new fiance, they know all of this about him, maybe she knows this information as well, or maybe she doesn't, but at least now it is out there and an informed decision can be made. 

Another client called because they are going through a heated child custody issue, his ex is alleging all of these nasty things about him while she is painting herself to be the perfect person. The client after living with her for so long knows that she is not clean but he lacks the proof to show it. We are tasked with shaking the bushes to see what comes out. Well we start shaking and at first all we find are the normal traffic incidents, but as we keep going we find some drug possession charges, charges that she has neglected to inform everyone, charges that she plead guilty to and served some time for. Could she be clean now? Yes. Could she be an excellent mother now?  Yes absolutely. Does the client and the decision makers deserve to have all of the information before making a determination that is going to affect the lives of others? Absolutely! 

These are some exceptions to the rule. Most backgrounds come up uneventful and with no issues. But anytime that you are making a life changing decision that is going to involve yourself and your family, you should always exercise due diligence, and we at Morrow Detective Agency can help you do just that. 

Morrow Detective Agency is a licensed private investigation firm located on the border of Ventura and Los Angeles, Ca in Simi Valley, CA. Morrow Detective Agency is capable of performing surveillance, process service, locates, background investigations, asset investigations, and more. Please feel free to visit our website at www.MorrowDetectiveAgency.com or give us a call at (805) 823-3540 and allow us to make your problem our solution!