The heirs of José Oriol Victoriano Segarra and María Irizarry Lugo lost their family home at Calle Barbosa #55 in Cataño, Puerto Rico, last month after a forged 1972 deed put the property in a stranger’s hands. The deed says the couple sold the house on June 30, 1972, to attorney Servando López Negrón, but José Oriol died on July 2, 1951, and María on August 22, 1959.
The notary named in the deed, Frank Torres Ortiz, is dead, and the Notarial Inspection Office (ODIN) certified that no such deed exists in his notarial protocol. Waldemar Fernández Rodríguez, a property dealer convicted of tax evasion, filed it at the Property Registry in 2024, 52 years later. A second deed, dated January 23, 2006, supposedly sold the house from López Negrón (who died in 2021) to Miguel Ángel Álvarez Pérez; its notary, Mark C. Jiménez Brackel, died in 2020, and ODIN also found no such deed.
Fernández Rodríguez filed both deeds on May 1, 2024, 19 minutes apart. On July 16, 2024, Álvarez Pérez sold the house to Blue Sky Properties LLC for $182,000. Blue Sky and Bahía Development are linked to the Bahía Apartments affordable housing project next door.
Estate executor Daniel Eduardo Garavito Medina sued in September 2025, but Judge Jaime Fuster Zalduondo of the Bayamón court dismissed the case with prejudice last month, finding he failed to prove possession one year before filing. UPR law professor José Alvarado Vázquez said the ruling does not decide ownership and a separate title suit remains possible.
Notary institute director Ángel Alicea Montañez said the long delay should raise a red flag.