A robber might risk one person’s life for their wallet, but a greedy yet shrewd businessman will put hundreds or even thousands of lives at risk for money. While not a businessman, Enrique Fernandez Jr. plotted something quite sinister for financial gain. He pretended to be his late father, a licensed engineer who died in 2018, and signed the building inspections for over 700 buildings across South Florida. According to WPLG Local 10, Fernandez has no college degree or any higher education for that matter, making him anything but qualified to carry out building inspections.
Bizarrely enough, Fernandez has yet to face any criminal charges, despite threatening the lives of hundreds of people who live or work in the buildings he ‘pseudo-inspected.’ He has some civil complaints on his name, however, and faces up to over $3 million in fines for his deceitful work. The authorities have gotten involved, albeit to a seemingly minimal extent, thus far. A detective stated that “He forged a dead man’s signature and used a dead person’s seal. So it makes it more complicated criminally, because there’s no victim.” Why in the world would putting possibly thousands of people’s lives in danger of faulty building structures not be criminal is beyond me.
“If somebody dies, he gets a very long prison sentence,” remarks a YouTube commenter. “That’s not civil, that’s Criminal?” another says in disbelief, to which a third agrees, saying this should definitely be labeled as a “serious crime.” Over a hundred people upvoted one commenter saying that “Miami is full of this [kind of people]. Do you think he is the only one? Think again.”
What’s remarkable is that this case has yet to be investigated with criminal charges, so the only way this news was discovered was through investigative journalism. In other words, no one, let alone those affected in South Florida, would have ever known about the risk this deceitful man posed if the journalists hadn’t looked into it all. Fortunately, WPLG Local 10 reports that all the buildings have been reinspected, and hopefully, this phony engineer pretending to be his dead dad will get what’s coming to him.
