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So, what’s going on with Dr. Munir Uwaydah?   Is he around?  Is he in California?  Is he in the United States?  The Middle East?  People occasionally pop up with their inquisitive emails and ask me this question.  What’s going on with the Kelly Soo Park case?  This question comes up regularly too.

As most of my readers well know, Dr. Munir Uwaydah was a workers’ compensation treating doctor who leaned hard towards the applicants’ side and then disappeared suddenly in June of 2010 just after one of his key assistants, Kelly Soo Park, was arrested for murder.  Ms. Park stands accused of killing one of Uwaydah’s former girlfriends, a 21-year-old aspiring actress and model named Juliana Redding in March of 2008.  Redding was found dead from strangulation on March 16^th 2008 in her Santa Monica apartment. 

Munir Uwaydah, M.D. has been well known in Southern California Workers’ Compensation claims for his unscrupulous and exploitive ways of abusing the California workers’ compensation system.  Overprescribing pain medications, unnecessary surgeries, abandoning patients, prescribing compounded medications, allowing physicians’ assistants to perform surgeries without his supervision, failing to record vital signs, and keep appropriate records on patients were just several peccadilloes within a much larger group of characteristic activities that fell within his modus operandi. 

The next hearing in the case of The People vs. Kelly Soo Park will be heard in the court room of Judge Kathleen Kennedy, Department 109, in downtown Los Angeles at the Clara Shortridge Foltz Criminal Justice Center at 210 E. Temple Street on Friday, tomorrow, May 20^th at 9:00 am.  The case has not even reached the Preliminary Hearing phase yet, having gotten bogged down and in conflict over discovery issues now for several months. 

Kelly Soo Park leaves the Downtown L.A. Criminal Court House on February 8th 2011 with her lawyer, Kay Rackauckas.

Very little media attention has been focused on this case lately since interest died down and shifted to the City of Bell scandal over the egregious embezzlements and misappropriations of funds that were perpetrated by key Bell administrators.  The media trucks with all of their film equipment have lined and hogged the sidewalks on Spring Street and Temple Street, bending around this Intersection, for the past three months—but all over the City of Bell embezzlement perpetrators and not because of any interest in Kelly Soo Park.  No media representatives except for myself have regularly shown up in Department 109 with the exception of CBS’s 48 Hours Mystery crew which came into that court room two months ago with a lone producer and a two man camera crew.  

About two weeks ago, one of Uwaydah’s long time lawyers, Richard Green of Green & Marker in Century City, was granted a motion to be relieved as counsel representing Uwaydah on a real estate law suit Uwaydah has been pursuing as the Plaintiff against Cindy Ogden and Jeff Holmes in the Pasadena Civil Courts. 

Uwaydah, whose further modus operandi is to sue everybody who doesn’t give him his way, sued Ogden and Holmes over a deal where Ogden, as the representative of the trustee of a bankrupted hospital together with some adjacent medical offices, finally refused to sell Uwaydah the hospital portion because he wasn’t financially qualified.


Cindy Ogden in September 2010

He himself had just been through a Chapter 7 bankruptcy but had not disclosed this to Cindy Ogden.  She found out on her own via her own investigating.  However, Uwaydah claimed they had a deal and that Ogden and Holmes broke the contract, so he sued them.  Uwaydah’s right hand woman on this whole transaction was none other than Kelly Soo Park. 

One fact I find amusing is that Dr. Uwaydah tried to buy just the hospital portion and talk Cindy’s partner into putting up Uwaydah’s portion of the deposit into the escrow as a guarantee they would sell him the hospital.  Ogden perked up at that red flag and said no way.  She refused to let her partner do it.

Numerous other individuals who have done business with Uwaydah weren’t so clairvoyant. Uwaydah has cheated many other people in business deals, including in real estate deals.  One doctor named Ari Tavitian got embroiled in a real estate debacle with Dr. Uwaydah over some medical building properties in the recent past but refuses to talk about it. 

“If he can’t screw you, he’s going to sue you,” Cindy Ogden commented in a phone conversation with this writer last Fall. 

To be continued.... see next article.

lonce@adjustercom.com