On July 11, 2022, Officer Brian Sguros and a partner responded to a call for a welfare check on a 71-year-old man who lived alone in a blue two-story house on a side street in Lauderhill, Fla. A neighbor reported that she had not seen the man, Dennis I. West, in about two weeks.
After arriving at the house in that city north of Miami, the officers found Mr. West’s decomposed body lying face up near the door, with no signs of any forced entry or crime. Everything proceeded routinely from there: The house was boarded up and the medical examiner determined that Mr. West had died of cardiovascular disease.
What happened over the next three years was anything but routine. According to the Broward County Sheriff’s Office, Officer Sguros, a member of the Lauderhill Police Department, proceeded to use Mr. West’s identity as part of a complex scheme to take control of the house, even though Mr. West had living relatives who should have inherited the property.
Officer Sguros, 35, was arrested on Tuesday and charged with official misconduct, criminal use of a deceased person’s identification, criminal use of personal identification information, offense against a computer user and unlawful use of a two-way communication device, the sheriff’s office said.
Officer Sguros did not respond to a text message on Thursday, and it wasn’t immediately clear if he had a lawyer. The Lauderhill Police Department said he had been placed on administrative leave without pay.
“Every officer in this department swears an oath to protect the people of Lauderhill, including those who can no longer speak for themselves,” the city’s police chief, Constance Stanley, said in a statement.
One of Mr. West’s brothers, Gary West, said he was appalled by the allegations.
“It’s a terrible thing for someone to do,” he said in an interview on Thursday. “If you can’t trust a police officer, who the hell can you trust?”
According to the sheriff’s office, Officer Sguros became involved in Mr. West’s affairs soon after discovering his body.
He told the medical examiner in Broward County that he was Mr. West’s friend, although there is no indication that he knew Mr. West, court records show. He also told the medical examiner that Mr. West had no living relatives and that he was willing to handle funeral arrangements, the records show.
In September 2022, Officer Sguros signed paperwork authorizing the medical examiner to release Mr. West’s body for cremation.
Marty Kiar, the Broward County property appraiser, said that investigators believed that Mr. West was cremated but they were still trying to find out what happened to his ashes.
According to court filings, Officer Sguros then began to repair Mr. West’s house, a 1,900-square-foot property with an attached garage that was built in the 1960s.
He paid the utility bills and property taxes and, by his own account, spent at least $214,000 on renovations to increase the property value. Broward County records indicate the house is now worth $403,590.
A neighbor said in court filings that after Mr. West died, she noticed work had been done on the lighting and air conditioning at the home and that the swimming pool had been covered. She also remembered chatting with a uniformed police officer outside the house and being happy that an officer was moving into the neighborhood.
In February 2025, Officer Sguros filed a formal legal notice to begin the process of claiming ownership of the property.
In a sworn statement in that case, Officer Sguros acknowledged that he had found Mr. West’s body and said that he “took possession” of the house in August 2022. At the time, he said, it was “uninhabitable” and filled with trash and debris. Its roof had partially collapsed and the swimming pool had been “left as an open pit,” he said.
A few months after Officer Sguros filed that legal notice, a realty company noticed it and discovered the house was associated with Mr. West. It located Mr. West’s living relatives, who include his two brothers, and paid them for the property.
But the company found that Officer Sguros was in possession of the house and contacted the Lauderhill Police Department, Mr. Kiar said. As the company prepared to take legal action against the officer, he surrendered the keys to the house, court records show.
Broward County investigators then dug into the case. They discovered that, in 2024, an application for a permit to repair the exterior doors and windows of Mr. West’s home appeared to have been filed by Mr. West, even though he had died two years earlier, court records show.
The paperwork listed Officer Sguros’s phone number as the contact, but it had Mr. West listed as the property owner, court records show. It also contained information from Mr. West’s Florida driver’s license and a signature that purported to be Mr. West’s, the sheriff’s office said. It said the detective overseeing the investigation believed Officer Sguros “forged West’s signature on the permit.”
Mr. Kiar said the case was unique among the hundreds of property crimes his office has investigated in South Florida, which he called “the title fraud capital of the world.”
“This is the first time that I can think of that someone in law enforcement is alleged to have done this, and that’s what makes this so concerning,” Mr. Kiar said, adding that the allegations represented “a true breach of the public trust.”
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