Huntington Beach, Downey men sentenced to 1 year for fraudulent engineering services

Two men convicted of 200-plus felony counts each for offenses tied to falsifying documents and providing fraudulent engineering services for hundreds of homes across Southern California were sentenced to one year in jail on Monday, officials said.

The men ran the fraud from 2007 to 2014, the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office said.

Wilfrido Rodriguez, 48, of Downey and Ruben Gutierrez, 45, of Huntington Beach were arrested in March 2018 and convicted in November.

Rodriguez was convicted of more than 250 felony counts of forgery, identity theft and grand theft. Gutierrez was convicted of more than 200, the District Attorney’s Office said.

Both defendants had faced sentences of more than 100 years in custody, authorities said.

In addition to the year in county jail, they were also sentenced to five years of formal probation, the District Attorney’s Office said.

The two men, who were not licensed professional civil engineers, forged the signature of one of the licensed civil engineers that owned Palos Verdes Engineering, prosecutors had earlier said.

The two men had worked for the firm at one point, the District Attorney’s Office and the Sheriff’s Department said. Rodriguez was a former engineering drafter, and Gutierrez was a former architectural designer.

Rodriguez and Gutierrez used the engineer’s seal to “deceive homeowners and municipalities into believing that the victim (the actual civil engineer) had personally drafted the engineering plans,” the District Attorney’s Office said in a statement.

The civil engineer did not review or approve any of the plans created by Rodriguez and Gutierrez, which called into question the safety of structures built on their calculations.

The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, which was alerted of the fraud by their former employer, identified more than 735 potential victims.

Those victims – in 56 cities in Los Angeles, Ventura, San Bernardino and Riverside counties – were warned to check for structural safety.

“It’s an extraordinary large fraud case, one of the rare fraud cases that involved concerns about widespread public-safety issues,” Deputy District Attorney Jeff Stodel said in an interview.

Stodel said this was the largest fraud case he’s prosecuted. When asked about how he felt about the one-year sentences, Stodel declined to comment.

Stewart Powell, who represented Rodriguez, said he thought the sentencing was fair.

“What they did was wrong,” Powell said. “They should not have used the stamp to get the plans approved, but this was not a state prison case, ever.”

Powell also rebuked the claim that homes and other buildings were unsafe: “No one has complained about any damage at all.”

Palos Verdes Engineering declined to comment.

An attorney for Gutierrez could not be reached for comment.