Robert Matava, a decorated World War II veteran, built up a successful auto repair business after the war while he and his wife raised a family in Unionville, Connecticut. After his wife died, the Purple Heart winner moved to Florida, leaving his home and business in the control of his son. He returned to Unionville in 2010 only to find that his son would no longer allow him in his own home, leaving him “penniless,” according to a report on the website of the Connecticut Health iTeam.
“In all my 90 years, I couldn’t predict the abuse I’d suffer” at the hands of a family member, he had testified at a hearing convened by U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, who is pushing legislation to strengthen detection and prosecution of elder abuse.
Sen. Blumenthal went on to propose legislation that would enhance existing federal protections against elder abuse. That was in 2012, and he has continued to introduce legislation on this issue every year since. Earlier this month, the Robert Matava Elder Abuse Prosecution Act of 2017 was signed into law.
And while the case of Robert Matava was one of a family member exploiting the financial trust placed in him by his father, it is perhaps not as appalling nor as shocking as the cases of exploitation committed by court-appointed guardians that are happening all over the country.
As the baby boomers begin entering into their seventies and then eighties, they are presenting a juicy target for unscrupulous lawyers and professional guardians, with a generous assist provided by an overburdened court system. A recent article in The New Yorker, by Rachel Aviv, relates the barely believable story of a couple in Las Vegas, Nevada. The Norths, Rudy and Rennie, were in their late seventies, living in an active adult community and enjoying the view of the golf course from their home just before Labor Day, 2013. A visiting nurse paid regular visits to the home as Rennie suffered from neuropathy after recovering from lymphoma.
Rudy chatted with the nurse in the kitchen for twenty minutes, joking about marriage and laundry, until there was a knock at the door. A stocky woman with shiny black hair introduced herself as April Parks, the owner of the company A Private Professional Guardian. She was accompanied by three colleagues, who didn’t give their names. Parks told the Norths that she had an order from the Clark County Family Court to “remove” them from their home. She would be taking them to an assisted-living facility. “Go and gather your things,” she said.
Rennie began crying. “This is my home,” she said.
One of Parks’s colleagues said that if the Norths didn’t comply he would call the police. Rudy remembers thinking, You’re going to put my wife and me in jail for this? But he felt too confused to argue.
In addition to the “Private Professional Guardian” racket, April Parks used the services of another vulture-like firm, Caring Transitions, who assisted her in inventorying the Norths’ possessions for sale and moving the Norths out of their home and into an assisted living facility—that same day.
Parks had been granted a temporary guardianship after filing an ex-parte petition claiming that the Norths posed a “substantial risk for mismanagement of medications, financial loss and physical harm.” Because it was an emergency ex-parte filing, the Norths were not advised of the hearing in the Family Court that granted Parks temporary guardianship. They did not even know they were being considered as being incapable of handling their own affairs.
Within a month, permanent guardianship was granted by Clark County guardianship commissioner Jon Norheim. Not a judge, but a lawyer, his decisions carry the weight of a formal ruling. Parks’ claims of the Norths’ inability to care for themselves were specious at best and completely ignored the existence of the Norths’ daughter, Julie Belshe, who lived nearby and saw the couple almost daily. The Norths were not represented by counsel at the guardianship hearing although Parks retained a lawyer to process the petition, billing the Norths’ estate $400 an hour.
According to Rachel Aviv’s report, Belshe found her parents at Lakeview Terrace, an assisted living facility that housed other wards of Parks.
As Belshe spoke to more wards and their families, she began to realize that Lakeview Terrace was not the only place where wards were lodged, and that Parks was not the only guardian removing people from their homes for what appeared to be superficial reasons. Hundreds of cases followed the same pattern. It had become routine for guardians in Clark County to petition for temporary guardianship on an ex-parte basis. They told the court that they had to intervene immediately because the ward faced a medical emergency that was only vaguely described: he or she was demented or disoriented, and at risk of exploitation or abuse. The guardians attached a brief physician’s certificate that contained minimal details and often stated that the ward was too incapacitated to attend a court hearing. Debra Bookout, an attorney at the Legal Aid Center of Southern Nevada, told me, “When a hospital or rehab facility needs to free up a bed, or when the patient is not paying his bills, some doctors get sloppy, and they will sign anything.” A recent study conducted by Hunter College found that a quarter of guardianship petitions in New York were brought by nursing homes and hospitals, sometimes as a means of collecting on overdue bills.
It took two years and the active interest of local journalists that Belshe alerted to the scam before the Norths were finally released in May 2015. Julie Belshe is now supporting her parents while they live in what used to be her home office.
Parks spent all the Norths’ money on fees—the hourly wages for her, her assistants, her lawyers, and the various contractors she hired—as well as on their monthly bills, which doubled under her guardianship. Belshe guesses that Parks—or whichever doctor or social worker referred her to the Norths—had assumed that her parents were wealthier than they actually were.
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Last March, Parks and her lawyer, along with her office manager and her husband, were indicted for perjury and theft, among other charges. The indictment was narrowly focussed on their double billings and their sloppy accounting, but, in a detailed summary of the investigation, Jaclyn O’Malley, who led the probe for the Nevada Attorney General’s Office, made passing references to the “collusion of hospital social workers and medical staff” who profited from their connection to Parks.
Family members and private guardianship companies may be in it for the money, but what can we make of it when a state plunders a ward’s estate?
William Dean lived with his widowed mother in their home in Rockland, Maine, until she passed away at the age of 102. Suffering from Aspergers’ Syndrome, Dean went into a deep depression after his mother’s death and sought help at the local emergency room. After a few weeks he was sent to the Dorothea Dix psychiatric hospital in Bangor, where he was treated for a year. According to the Portland Press Herald:
Shortly after his hospitalization, the state Department of Health and Human Services applied for and was granted conservatorship over his finances. It sold one of his houses for less than half the assessed value – ostensibly to cover the cost of his care while hospitalized, which would have been thousands of dollars a month. It tried to sell the other house but only after failing to winterize it over the winter, which diminished its worth. It liquidated most of his possessions, including a concert-quality organ and several family antiques. It even approved the euthanizing of his companion, a 10-year-old Himalayan cat named Caterpillar.
Dean was released from the hospital without a home to return to. His prized organ was gone. His cat was dead.
The strangest aspect of this case was the behavior of the state. They rushed to sell his cottage on Owls Head for less than one-half of what it was worth, claiming that the property tax lien on the house was going to lead to foreclosure. Which it possibly could have, but as the Press Herald reported, that would have been very unusual, especially when a hardship is involved, as it clearly was in Dean’s case. As a family member was having an injunction filed to stop the sale, the state moved the sale up by one day, preventing any injunction from stopping it.
Along with his Aspergers’ Syndrome, Dean was a musical savant who taught himself to play the organ and, at the time of his hospitalization, owned three organs, one of which, a Roland Atelier concert organ, retailed for $24,000. The state auctioned it off and sold his 2000 Cadillac, worth $5,000 for $385.
During the winter of 2012/2013, the state failed to winterize Dean’s Rockland home. Pipes froze, burst, and flooded the home, leaving behind mold that made the house unsellable and uninhabitable. When he was released from Dorothea Dix in June 2013, he had no car, no cat, and nowhere to live. Oh, did I mention that he was also left with a $31,000 capital gains tax bill due to the sale of the Owls Head property?
His cousin, who had won guardianship in spring 2013, joined forces with Dean’s sister to sue the state.
Finally, in December 2015, Justice Horton, of the Maine Business and Consumer Court in Portland, ruled that the lawsuit could go forward but only on the single issue of whether the state breached its fiduciary duty while it served as Dean’s conservator in 2012 and 2013.
“The undisputed facts suggest that the effects of DHHS’ management of Mr. Dean’s affairs during what was supposed to be a temporary conservatorship were anything but temporary,” Horton wrote. “In the span of six months, most of what Mr. Dean owned and valued wound up being sold off, flooded or euthanized, as a result of DHHS’ intervention on his behalf.”
The Maine Supreme Judicial Court ruled, without comment on the behavior of the DHHS, that it had immunity under the Maine Tort Claims Act and cannot be sued for monetary damages. The family has since filed a claim under the state’s surety bond. They are also seeking legislative changes to the state law that allows it to act as a guardian with no accountability.
So, what remedies do the laws allow? While probate law (under which guardianship is generally determined) is a matter strictly for the states to legislate, the new federal law promises some assistance. There are steps that you can take to protect yourself, your parents, or your grandparents. And there are advocacy groups, often established by the family members of wards, that are working to prevent the looting of the estates of seniors.
Oh, and the Clark County guardianship commissioner, Jon Norheim, who failed to monitor the for-profit guardians to whom he entrusted the financial and medical well-being of the wards? Although Parks and her crew were indicted for their roles, he was simply reassigned. He is no longer in charge of preventing the abuse of the elderly, and has been transferred to “dependency court, where he now oversees cases involving abused and neglected children,” according to The New Yorker report.