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| Gloria Byars |
One of three defendants charged with embezzling more than $1 million from approximately 112 victims through court-appointed guardianships has waived a preliminary hearing in district court, according to online court records.
Gloria F. Byars is scheduled for formal arraignment March 25 in Media. Her attorney, Sharon Denise Alexander, did not respond to an email Friday seeking comment.
Byars is charged with hundreds of counts of theft, conspiracy, receiving stolen property and failure to make required dispensation of funds. Co-defendants Keith and Carolyn Collins, both pastors of the Church of the Overcomer in Trainer, each face 45 similar charges. Byars is Carolyn Collins’ sister.
According to an affidavit of probable cause, Byars was hired by Robert Stump as an office manager for RES Consulting in 2008. Before she was fired in October 2016, Byars allegedly opened a bank account in the name of one person for whom RES had been assigned as guardian and transferred more than $182,000 to an account she controlled.
She also allegedly took files on cases where she assisted as a guardian from the RES office and established a company called ICU Records and Billing, which the affidavit identifies as a “shell company.”
Investigators executed warrants at businesses associated with Byars and discovered $855,964 worth of unauthorized transactions into ICURB, according to her affidavit.
The affidavit alleges additional funds had been funneled into two other shell companies, ACC Medical and CWR Medical, which were depleted and used for personal expenses like Netflix, trips and hotel stays.
Investigators also discovered $28,739 had been issued from ICURB to the Church of the Overcomer between June 2015 and February 2017, according to the affidavit. Keith and Carolyn Collins, of the first block of Princeton Avenue in Ridley Park, also owned and operated another guardianship company, Pinnacle Guardians LLC, according to the affidavits. Carolyn Collins allegedly deposited at least two checks from the bank accounts of two different wards in March 2016 totaling $8,986 into an ICURB account for unknown reasons.
Pinnacle was stripped of all guardianship cases in Delaware County in February 2017, after a nursing home complained it was not receiving Social Security payments for a 94-year-old ward living there.
An investigation revealed 18 of 25 wards assigned to Pinnacle had suffered approximately $110,319 worth of unauthorized transactions between November 2016 and May 2017, according to the Carolyn Collins affidavit.
The total amount of fraud alleged comes to $1,009,172 and involves 112 victims in Philadelphia, Delaware, Bucks, Berks, Montgomery and Lancaster counties. All of the alleged victims are over the age of 60 and many are in their 80s and 90s.
Keith Collins, a longtime staple of the church community and Democratic candidate in the 2011 County Council race, denied the allegations when he was arrested in October.
“I’m a pastor and if there were donations made, people are allowed to make donations to the church,” he told reporters outside the county courthouse in Media.
“Each defendant has their own situation,” said Keith Collins’ defense attorney Enrique Latoison Friday. “This is not a ‘conspiracy’ where everyone is working together. Byars, she did what she did. Keith, as far as I’m concerned, is 100 percent innocent.”
Latoison said his client never had a guardianship assigned to him and he does not intend on waiving a preliminary hearing in that case, scheduled for April 2 before Magisterial District Judge Elisa C. Lacianca.
Michael Dugan, representing Carolyn Collins, said he likewise intends to litigate the case on behalf of his client on that same date. While people waive preliminary hearings for different reasons, Dugan said, he believed in this case it was indicative of Byars’ culpability.
Court records indicate Keith and Carolyn Collins posted 10% of $100,000 bail Oct. 23, while Byars posted 10% of $500,000 bail Nov. 8.
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Defendant in $1M embezzlement scheme waives prelim
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