HIALEAH GARDENS, Fla. – A 62-year-old Coral Gables woman was telling a police officer all about how she backed her black Mercedes-Benz into a pickup truck in Hialeah Gardens. But police say an alert witness helped them uncover her insurance scam.
Silvia Maria Almeida called them to the intersection of Northwest 89th Avenue and 117th Street to report a crash just before 10:15 p.m. on Wednesday, according to police.
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Almeida and her passenger, Milton Yunielki Acosta, 41, couldn’t get their stories straight: Almeida said she had known him for months and he said he had just met her, according to police.
A responding officer documented the “extensive” damage to the Mercedes-Benz C-Class after Almeida reported she had damaged a red Dodge Ram’s rim, but the officer couldn’t see the damage that she was describing on the truck, according to the report.
While all this played out, a witness walked up to the police officer and said Almeida’s car was parked outside of a nearby body shop and was already damaged before she pulled up to the truck, according to police.
Additionally, the witness told officers that he saw the duo “driving around in the neighborhood” and looking at other cars before the supposed crash, Acosta’s arrest report states.
Soon after, police said Almeida admitted to making everything up.
She said the staged crash in Hialeah Gardens was an attempt to “re-enact” a March crash she had with a pickup truck on Northwest Fifth Street in Miami, where neither she nor the other driver stopped or called police, the arrest report states.
She chose the Dodge Ram, police said, because it “looked similar to the one she had crashed with” in Miami.
Detectives also learned the pickup truck involved in the crash on Wednesday was registered to the body shop where the witness reported Almeida had been, police said. Officers arrested Almeida and Acosta and took them to the Turner Guilford Knight Correctional Center.
As of Thursday afternoon, Almeida was being held on a $7,500 bond on an insurance fraud charge.
Jail records no longer listed Acosta, who resides in Hialeah, as an inmate. He faced a charge of accessory after the fact.
Detectives were asking anyone with information about insurance fraud like this one to call Miami-Dade County Crime Stoppers at 305-471-8477.