A Chester County woman, awaiting trial in a fatal overdose, is convicted of stealing $168K from her father

A Downingtown lawyer was convicted Tuesday of defrauding her elderly father of $168,000, money she stole, prosecutors said, to pay her personal expenses while acting as his power of attorney.

It took a Bucks County jury about two hours to find Diane Rohrman, 49, guilty of theft by unlawful taking, identity theft, and related offenses after a three-day trial before County Judge Stephen Corr. Her sentencing was deferred 60 days.

Rohrman, who represented herself, denied any wrongdoing in the case. She was taken into custody after the verdict, unable to post bail, set at 10% of $100,000.

Her legal troubles are not over. Rohrman faces charges of drug delivery resulting in death and drug possession in her native Chester County for allegedly providing her husband, Emeka Nwadiora Jr., with heroin and filming him as he fatally overdosed.

After Rohrman’s arrest in Nwadiora’s death, her father, Gerald, discovered some irregularities in his finances and learned that she had been siphoning money from his savings for years.

Rohrman had acted as her father’s power of attorney since 2016, according to court records. When she was arrested in August 2019, her family contacted the bank that held his accounts to take over financial stewardship.

What they discovered stunned them, according to Rohrman’s older sister, Christine Koper.

“It looked like she was helping my dad, but she was setting him up,” Koper told The Inquirer in a recent interview. “When she ended up taking care of Dad’s accounts, we thought this would be a good thing for her, because she had the skills to do it.

“But I just never imagined she would do this,” she said.

Rohrman’s father, who is 83, is a resident of Ann’s Choice, a senior living facility in Warminster and relied on her to handle his finances, in part because of her experience as a lawyer, Koper said.

(Rohrman’s law license has been temporarily suspended. Last year, after she was charged in the fatal overdose, she filed a petition for suspension. Previously, she worked as a mediator and a product liability attorney.)

Over the course of three years, Rohrman spent the money she stole from her father on personal expenses, including improvements to her home in Downingtown and thousands of dollars in credit card debt, according to the affidavit of probable cause for her arrest.

She also withdrew more than $35,000 in cash and wrote more than $88,000 in checks to herself, prosecutors said, money that was not put toward her father’s care. She also used her father’s money to pay a traffic fine and the filing fee for a civil suit in Chester County.

Prosecutors in Bucks County initially planned to delay the fraud case until after the more serious case in Chester County was resolved, but they decided to move forward when that case was pushed into next year.

Rohrman had pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter in Nwadiora’s death in March, a negotiated deal that would have spared her from the more serious felony charges in the case. But Rohrman withdrew the plea at the last minute during her sentencing hearing in September, telling Chester County Judge Analisa Sondergaard that she hadn’t agreed on a prison term with prosecutors, who had asked the judge to sentence her to 1½ to 5 years.

A trial in the case is now scheduled for January.

Nwadiora, 41, was found unresponsive in the home he shared with Rohrman in August 2019. Rohrman, who had called 911, told responding officers that her husband had died from a heroin overdose, according to the affidavit of probable cause for her arrest.

Nwadiora was on house arrest after a DUI conviction and hadn’t left his home in days, the affidavit said. Rohrman initially told the officers she suspected that a friend of his had hidden the narcotic inside a shoebox that Rohrman had picked up for him.

She also showed the officers a video she had recorded of Nwadiora after he had taken the heroin — she said she filmed it to show him later how he acted while on the drug, the affidavit said.

In the video, Rohrman can be seen asking Nwadiora how much heroin he took and rubbing cocaine into his mouth in an attempt to keep him awake.

Later, after questioning by the officer, Rohrman admitted she bought the heroin for him. She said she did so after Nwadiora, who was in withdrawal, threatened to assault her if she didn’t provide him with the narcotic.