I’m nearing age 61. I say my age because an old Internet
friend sent me an article relating to elderly abuse published in The New
Yorker. The article could almost be read as a short story of terror except
for one mitigating fact. IT IS TRUE!
If you are a son, daughter, grandson, granddaughter, beloved
nephew or niece; YOU need to pay attention! The elders you love in whichever
relationship, might be in danger of a complete stranger unilaterally having a
court declare your elder loved ones too incompetent to take care of themselves
and become declared their guardian. It gets worse! After becoming the legal
guardian of your loved elders, they become in charge of all the loved ones’
assets – house, money, expensive furniture, expensive art and so on. Once in
charge by order of the courts, the guardian can duly fleece your elders of
everything they own for the guardian’s personal gain.
This is how my friend introduced the link:
This is a must read. People all
across the country are using the courts to rob elders and I believe they are
willing to kill them. Total strangers claim guardianship responsibilities then
commit them to retirement homes or mental health institutions. On the excuse of
paying for those services, they take everything they own, bank accounts, homes,
furniture, everything!!!
Read the true horror.
JRH 10/27/17 (Hat Tip: Bob Judge)
***************
How the Elderly Lose Their Rights
Guardians can sell the assets and control the lives of
senior citizens without their consent—and reap a profit from it.
By Rachel Aviv
October 9, 2017 Issue
Guardian-Strangers Fleecing Elderly - Illustration by Anna Parini
After a stranger became their guardian, Rudy and Rennie
North were moved to a nursing home and their property was sold.
For
years, Rudy North woke up at 9 a.m. and read the Las
Vegas Review-Journal while eating a piece of toast. Then he
read a novel—he liked James Patterson and Clive Cussler—or, if he was feeling
more ambitious, Freud. On scraps of paper and legal notepads, he jotted down
thoughts sparked by his reading. “Deep below the rational part of our brain is
an underground ocean where strange things swim,” he wrote on one notepad. On
another, “Life: the longer it cooks, the better it tastes.”
Rennie, his wife of fifty-seven years, was slower to rise.
She was recovering from lymphoma and suffered from neuropathy so severe that
her legs felt like sausages. Each morning, she spent nearly an hour in the
bathroom applying makeup and lotions, the same brands she’d used for forty
years. She always emerged wearing pale-pink lipstick. Rudy, who was prone to
grandiosity, liked to refer to her as “my amour.”
On the Friday before Labor Day, 2013, the Norths had just
finished their toast when a nurse, who visited five times a week to help Rennie
bathe and dress, came to their house, in Sun City Aliante, an “active adult”
community in Las Vegas. They had moved there in 2005, when Rudy, a retired
consultant for broadcasters, was sixty-eight and Rennie was sixty-six. They
took pride in their view of the golf course, though neither of them played
golf.
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.
Parks drove a Pontiac G-6 convertible with a license plate
that read “crtgrdn,” for “court guardian.” In the past twelve years, she
had been a guardian for some four hundred wards of the court. Owing to age or
disability, they had been deemed incompetent, a legal term that describes those
who are unable to make reasoned choices about their lives or their property. As
their guardian, Parks had the authority to manage their assets, and to choose
where they lived, whom they associated with, and what medical treatment they
received. They lost nearly all their civil rights.
Without realizing it, the Norths had become temporary wards
of the court. Parks had filed an emergency ex-parte petition, which provides an
exception to the rule that both parties must be notified of any argument before
a judge. She had alleged that the Norths posed a “substantial risk for
mismanagement of medications, financial loss and physical harm.” She submitted
a brief letter from a physician’s assistant, whom Rennie had seen once, stating
that “the patient’s husband can no longer effectively take care of the patient
at home as his dementia is progressing.” She also submitted a letter from one
of Rudy’s doctors, who described him as “confused and agitated.”
Rudy and Rennie had not undergone any cognitive assessments.
They had never received a diagnosis of dementia. In addition to Freud, Rudy was
working his way through Nietzsche and Plato. Rennie read romance novels.
Parks told the Norths that if they didn’t come willingly an
ambulance would take them to the facility, a place she described as a
“respite.” Still crying, Rennie put cosmetics and some clothes into a suitcase.
She packed so quickly that she forgot her cell phone and Rudy’s hearing aid.
After thirty-five minutes, Parks’s assistant led the Norths to her car. When a
neighbor asked what was happening, Rudy told him, “We’ll just be gone for a
little bit.” He was too proud to draw attention to their predicament. “Just
think of it as a mini-vacation,” he told Rennie.
After
the Norths left, Parks walked through the house with Cindy Breck, the owner of
Caring Transitions, a company that relocates seniors and sells their belongings
at estate sales. Breck and Parks had a routine. “We open drawers,” Parks said
at a deposition. “We look in closets. We pull out boxes, anything that would
store—that would keep paperwork, would keep valuables.” She took a pocket
watch, birth certificates, insurance policies, and several collectible coins.
The Norths’ daughter, Julie Belshe, came to visit later that
afternoon. A fifty-three-year-old mother of three sons, she and her husband run
a small business designing and constructing pools. She lived ten miles away and
visited her parents nearly every day, often taking them to her youngest son’s
football games. She was her parents’ only living child; her brother and sister
had died.
She knocked on the front door several times and then tried
to push the door open, but it was locked. She was surprised to see the kitchen
window closed; her parents always left it slightly open. She drove to the
Sun City Aliante clubhouse, where her parents sometimes drank coffee. When
she couldn’t find them there, she thought that perhaps they had gone on an
errand together—the farthest they usually drove was to Costco. But, when she
returned to the house, it was still empty.
That weekend, she called her parents several times. She also
called two hospitals to see if they had been in an accident. She called their
landlord, too, and he agreed to visit the house. He reported that there were no
signs of them. She told her husband, “I think someone kidnapped my parents.”
On the Tuesday after Labor Day, she drove to the house again
and found a note taped to the door: “In case of emergency, contact guardian
April Parks.” Belshe dialled [sic] the number. Parks, who had a brisk, girlish
way of speaking, told Belshe that her parents had been taken to Lakeview
Terrace, an assisted-living facility in Boulder City, nine miles from the
Arizona border. She assured Belshe that the staff there would take care of all
their needs.
“You can’t just walk into somebody’s home and take them!”
Belshe told her.
Parks responded calmly, “It’s legal. It’s legal.”
Guardianship
derives from the state’s parens patriae power, its duty to act
as a parent for those considered too vulnerable to care for themselves. “The
King shall have the custody of the lands of natural fools, taking the profits
of them without waste or destruction, and shall find them their necessaries,”
reads the English statute De Prerogative Regis, from 1324. The law
was imported to the colonies—guardianship is still controlled by state, not
federal, law—and has remained largely intact for the past eight hundred years.
It establishes a relationship between ward and guardian that is rooted in
trust.
In the United States, a million and a half adults are under
the care of guardians, either family members or professionals, who control some
two hundred and seventy-three billion dollars in assets, according to an
auditor for the guardianship fraud program in Palm Beach County. Little is
known about the outcome of these arrangements, because states do not keep
complete figures on guardianship cases—statutes vary widely—and, in most
jurisdictions, the court records are sealed. A Government Accountability report
from 2010 said, “We could not locate a single Web site, federal agency, state
or local entity, or any other organization that compiles comprehensive
information on this issue.” A study published this year by the American Bar
Association found that “an unknown number of adults languish under
guardianship” when they no longer need it, or never did. The authors wrote that
“guardianship is generally “permanent, leaving no way out—‘until death do us
part.’”
When the Norths were removed from their home, they joined
nearly nine thousand adult wards in the Las Vegas Valley. In the past twenty
years, the city has promoted itself as a retirement paradise. Attracted by the
state’s low taxes and a dry, sunny climate, elderly people leave their families
behind to resettle in newly constructed senior communities. “The whole town
sparkled, pulling older people in with the prospect of the American Dream at a
reasonable price,” a former real-estate agent named Terry Williams told me.
Roughly thirty per cent of the people who move to Las Vegas are senior
citizens, and the number of Nevadans older than eighty-five has risen by nearly
eighty per cent in the past decade.
In Nevada, as in many states, anyone can become a guardian
by taking a course, as long as he or she has not been convicted of a felony or
recently declared bankruptcy. Elizabeth Brickfield, a Las Vegas lawyer who has
worked in guardianship law for twenty years, said that about fifteen years ago,
as the state’s elderly population swelled, “all these private guardians started
arriving, and the docket exploded. The court became a factory.”
Pamela Teaster, the director of the Center for Gerontology
at Virginia Tech and one of the few scholars in the country who study
guardianship, told me that, though most guardians assume their duties for good
reasons, the guardianship system is “a morass, a total mess.” She said, “It is
unconscionable that we don’t have any data, when you think about the vast power
given to a guardian. It is one of society’s most drastic interventions.”
After
talking to Parks, Belshe drove forty miles to Lakeview Terrace, a complex of
stucco buildings designed to look like a hacienda. She found her parents in a
small room with a kitchenette and a window overlooking the parking lot. Rennie
was in a wheelchair beside the bed, and Rudy was curled up on a love seat in
the fetal position. There was no phone in the room. Medical-alert buttons were
strung around their necks. “They were like two lost children,” Belshe said.
She asked her parents who Parks was and where she could find
the court order, but, she said, “they were overwhelmed and humiliated, and they
didn’t know what was going on.” They had no idea how or why Parks had targeted
them as wards. Belshe was struck by their passive acceptance. “It was like they
had Stockholm syndrome or something,” she told me.
Belshe acknowledged that her parents needed a few hours of
help each day, but she had never questioned their ability to live alone. “They
always kept their house really nice and clean, like a museum,” she said.
Although Rudy’s medical records showed that he occasionally had “staring
spells,” all his medical-progress notes from 2013 described him as alert and
oriented. He did most of the couple’s cooking and shopping, because Rennie,
though lucid, was in so much pain that she rarely left the house. Belshe
sometimes worried that her father inadvertently encouraged her mother to be
docile: “She’s a very smart woman, though she sometimes acts like she’s not. I
have to tell her, ‘That’s not cute, Mom.’”
When Belshe called Parks to ask for the court order, Parks
told her that she was part of the “sandwich generation,” and that it would be
too overwhelming for her to continue to care for her children and her parents
at the same time. Parks billed her wards’ estates for each hour that she spent
on their case; the court placed no limits on guardians’ fees, as long as they
appeared “reasonable.” Later, when Belshe called again to express her anger,
Parks charged the Norths twenty-four dollars for the eight-minute conversation.
“I could not understand what the purpose of the call was other than she wanted
me to know they had rights,” Parks wrote in a detailed invoice. “I terminated
the phone call as she was very hostile and angry.”
A month after removing
the Norths from their house, Parks petitioned to make the guardianship
permanent. She was represented by an attorney who was paid four hundred dollars
an hour by the Norths’ estate. A hearing was held at Clark County Family Court.
The Clark County guardianship commissioner, a lawyer named
Jon Norheim, has presided over nearly all the guardianship cases in the county
since 2005. He works under the supervision of a judge, but his orders have the
weight of a formal ruling. Norheim awarded a guardianship to Parks, on average,
nearly once a week. She had up to a hundred wards at a time. “I love April
Parks,” he said at one hearing, describing her and two other professional
guardians, who frequently appeared in his courtroom, as “wonderful,
good-hearted, social-worker types.”
Norheim’s court perpetuated a cold, unsentimental view of
family relations: the ingredients for a good life seemed to have little to do
with one’s children and siblings. He often dismissed the objections of
relatives, telling them that his only concern was the best interest of the
wards, which he seemed to view in a social vacuum. When siblings fought over
who would be guardian, Norheim typically ordered a neutral professional to
assume control, even when this isolated the wards from their families.
Rudy had assured Belshe that he would protest the
guardianship, but, like most wards in the country, Rudy and Rennie were not
represented by counsel. As Rudy stood before the commissioner, he convinced
himself that guardianship offered him and Rennie a lifetime of care without
being a burden to anyone they loved. He told Norheim, “The issue really is her
longevity—what suits her.” Belshe, who sat in the courtroom, said, “I was
shaking my head. No, no, no—don’t do that!” Rennie was silent.
Norheim ordered that the Norths become permanent wards of
the court. “Chances are, I’ll probably never see you folks again; you’ll work
everything out,” he said, laughing. “I very rarely see people after the initial
time in court.” The hearing lasted ten minutes.
The
following month, Even Tide Life Transitions, a company that Parks often hired,
sold most of the Norths’ belongings. “The general condition of this inventory
is good,” an appraiser wrote. Two lithographs by Renoir were priced at
thirty-eight hundred dollars, and a glass cocktail table (“Client states that
it is a Brancusi design”) was twelve hundred and fifty dollars. The Norths also
had several pastel drawings by their son, Randy, who died in a motorcycle
accident at the age of thirty-two, as well as Kachina dolls, a Bose radio, a
Dyson vacuum cleaner, a Peruvian tapestry, a motion-step exerciser, a LeRoy
Neiman sketch of a bar in Dublin, and two dozen pairs of Clarke shoes.
According to Parks’s calculations, the Norths had roughly fifty thousand
dollars. Parks transferred their savings, held at the Bank of America, to an
account in her name.
Rennie repeatedly asked for her son’s drawings, and for the
family photographs on her refrigerator. Rudy pined for his car, a midnight-blue
2010 Chrysler, which came to symbolize the life he had lost. He missed the
routine interactions that driving had allowed him. “Everybody at the pharmacy
was my buddy,” he said. Now he and Rennie felt like exiles. Rudy said, “They
kept telling me, ‘Oh, you don’t have to worry: your car is fine, and this and
that.’” A month later, he said, “they finally told me, ‘Actually, we sold your
car.’ I said, ‘What in the hell did you sell it for?’” It was bought for less
than eight thousand dollars, a price that Rudy considered insulting.
Rudy lingered in the dining room after eating breakfast each
morning, chatting with other residents of Lakeview Terrace. He soon discovered
that ten other wards of April Parks lived there. His next-door neighbor, Adolfo
Gonzalez, a short, bald seventy-one-year-old who had worked as a maître d’ at
the MGM Grand Las Vegas, had become Parks’s ward at a hearing that lasted a
minute and thirty-one seconds.
Gonzalez, who had roughly three hundred and fifty thousand
dollars in assets, urged Rudy not to accept the nurse’s medications. “If
you take the pills, they’ll make sure you don’t make it to court,” he said.
Gonzalez had been prescribed the antipsychotic medications Risperdal and
Depakote, which he hid in the side of his mouth without swallowing. He wanted
to remain vigilant. He often spoke of a Salvador Dali painting that had been
lost when Parks took over his life. Once, she charged him two hundred and ten
dollars for a visit in which, according to her invoice, he expressed that “he
feels like a prisoner.”
Rudy was so distressed by his conversations with Gonzalez
that he asked to see a psychologist. “I thought maybe he’d give me some sort of
objective learning as to what I was going through,” he said. “I wanted to ask
basic questions, like What the hell is going on?” Rudy didn’t find the session
illuminating, but he felt a little boost to his self-esteem when the
psychologist asked that he return for a second appointment. “I guess he found
me terribly charming,” he told me.
Rudy liked to fantasize about an alternative life as a
psychoanalyst, and he tried to befriend the wards who seemed especially
hopeless. “Loneliness is a physical pain that hurts all over,” he wrote in his
notebook. He bought a pharmaceutical encyclopedia and advised the other wards
about medications they’d been prescribed. He also ran for president of the
residents, promising that under his leadership the kitchen would no longer
advertise canned food as homemade. (He lost—he’s not sure if anyone besides
Rennie voted for him—but he did win a seat on the residents’ council.)
He was particularly concerned about a ward of Parks’s named
Marlene Homer, a seventy-year-old woman who had been a professor. “Now she was
almost hiding behind the pillars,” Rudy said. “She was so obsequious. She was,
like, ‘Run me over. Run me over.’” She’d become a ward in 2012, after Parks
told the court, “She has admitted to strange thoughts, depression, and doing
things she can’t explain.” On a certificate submitted to the court, an
internist had checked a box indicating that Homer was “unable to attend the
guardianship court hearing because______,” but he didn’t fill in a reason.
The Norths could guess which residents were Parks’s wards by
the way they were dressed. Gonzalez wore the same shirt to dinner nearly every
day. “Forgive me,” he told the others at his table. When a friend tried to take
him shopping, Parks prevented the excursion because she didn’t know the friend.
Rennie had also tried to get more clothes. “I reminded ward that she has plenty
of clothing in her closet,” Parks wrote. “I let her know that they are on a
tight budget.” The Norths’ estate was charged a hundred and eighty dollars for
the conversation.
Another resident, Barbara Neely, a fifty-five-year-old with
schizophrenia, repeatedly asked Parks to buy her outfits for job interviews.
She was applying for a position with the Department of Education. After Neely’s
third week at Lakeview Terrace, Parks’s assistant sent Parks a text. “Can you
see Barbara Neely anytime this week?” she wrote. “She has questions on the
guardianship and how she can get out of it.” Parks responded, “I can and she
can’t.” Neely had been in the process of selling her house, for a hundred and
sixty-eight thousand dollars, when Parks became her guardian and took charge of
the sale.
The rationale for the guardianship of Norbert Wilkening, who
lived on the bottom floor of the facility, in the memory-care ward, for people
with dementia (“the snake pit,” Rudy called it), was also murky. Parks’s office
manager, who advertised himself as a “Qualified Dementia Care Specialist”—a
credential acquired through video training sessions—had given Wilkening a
“Mini-Mental State Examination,” a list of eleven questions and tasks,
including naming as many animals as possible in a minute. Wilkening had failed.
His daughter, Amy, told me, “I didn’t see anything that was happening to him
other than a regular getting-older process, but when I was informed by all
these people that he had all these problems I was, like, Well, maybe I’m just
in denial. I’m not a professional.” She said that Parks was “so highly touted.
By herself, by the social workers, by the judge, by everyone that knew her.”
At a hearing, when Amy complained to Norheim that Parks
didn’t have time for her father, he replied, “Yeah, she’s an industry at this
point.”
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 often took several days for relatives to realize what had
happened. When they tried to contest the guardianship or become guardians
themselves, they were dismissed as unsuitable, and disparaged in court records
as being neglectful, or as drug addicts, gamblers, and exploiters. (Belshe was
described by Parks as a “reported addict” who “has no contact with the proposed
ward,” an allegation that Belshe didn’t see until it was too late to
challenge.) Family who lived out of state were disqualified from serving as
guardians, because the law prohibited the appointment of anyone who didn’t live
in Nevada.
Once the court approved the guardianship, the wards were
often removed from their homes, which were eventually sold. Terry Williams,
whose father’s estate was taken over by strangers even though he’d named her
the executor of his will, has spent years combing through guardianship,
probate, and real-estate records in Clark County. “I kept researching, because
I was so fascinated that these people could literally take over the lives and
assets of people under color of law, in less than ten minutes, and nobody was
asking questions,” she told me. “These people spent their lives accumulating
wealth and, in a blink of an eye, it was someone else’s.”
Williams has reviewed hundreds of cases involving Jared
Shafer, who is considered the godfather of guardians in Nevada. In the records
room of the courthouse, she was afraid to say Shafer’s name out loud. In the
course of his thirty-five-year career, Shafer has assumed control of more than
three thousand wards and estates and trained a generation of guardians. In
1979, he became the county’s public administrator, handling the estates of
people who had no relatives in Nevada, as well as the public guardian, serving
wards when no family members or private guardians were available. In 2003, he
left government and founded his own private guardianship and fiduciary
business; he transferred the number of his government-issued phone to himself.
Williams took records from Shafer’s and other guardians’
cases to the Las Vegas police department several times. She tried to explain,
she said, that “this is a racketeering operation that is fee-based. There’s no
brown paper bag handed off in an alley. The payoff is the right to bill the
estate.” The department repeatedly told her that it was a civil issue, and
refused to take a report. In 2006, she submitted a typed statement, listing
twenty-three statutes that she thought had been violated, but an officer wrote
in the top right corner, “not a police matter.” Adam Woodrum, an estate
lawyer in Las Vegas, told me that he’s worked with several wards and their
families who have brought their complaints to the police. “They can’t even get
their foot in the door,” he said.
Acting as her own attorney, Williams filed a racketeering
suit in federal court against Shafer and the lawyers who represented him. At a
hearing before the United States District Court of Central California in 2009,
she told the judge, “They are trumping up ways and means to deem people incompetent
and take their assets.” The case was dismissed. “The scheme is ingenious,” she
told me. “How do you come up with a crime that literally none of the victims
can articulate without sounding like they’re nuts? The same insane allegations
keep surfacing from people who don’t know each other.”
In 2002, in a petition to the Clark County District Court, a
fifty-seven-year-old man complained that his mother had lost her constitutional
rights because her kitchen was understocked and a few bills hadn’t been paid.
The house they shared was then placed on the market. The son wrote, “If the
only showing necessary to sell the home right out from under someone is that
their ‘estate’ would benefit, then no house in Clark County is safe, nor any
homeowner.” Under the guise of benevolent paternalism, guardians seemed to be
creating a kind of capitalist dystopia: people’s quality of life was being
destroyed in order to maximize their capital.
When Concetta Mormon, a wealthy woman who owned a Montessori
school, became Shafer’s ward because she had aphasia, Shafer sold the school
midyear, even though students were enrolled. At a hearing after the sale,
Mormon’s daughter, Victoria Cloutier, constantly spoke out of turn. The judge,
Robert Lueck, ordered that she be handcuffed and placed in a holding cell while
the hearing continued. Two hours later, when Cloutier was allowed to return for
the conclusion, the judge told her that she had thirty days in which to vacate
her mother’s house. If she didn’t leave, she would be evicted and her
belongings would be taken to Goodwill.
The opinions of wards were also disregarded. In 2010,
Guadalupe Olvera, a ninety-year-old veteran of the Second World War, repeatedly
asked that his daughter and not Shafer be appointed his guardian. “The ward is
not to go to court,” Shafer instructed his assistants. When Olvera was finally
permitted to attend a hearing, nearly a year after becoming a ward, he
expressed his desire to live with his daughter in California, rather than
under Shafer’s care. “Why is everybody against that?” he asked Norheim. “I
don’t need that man.” Although Nevada’s guardianship law requires that courts
favor relatives over professionals, Norheim continued the guardianship, saying,
“The priority ship sailed.”
When Olvera’s daughter eventually defied the court’s orders
and took her father to live at her seaside home in Northern California,
Norheim’s supervisor, Judge Charles Hoskin, issued an arrest warrant for her
“immediate arrest and incarceration” without bail. The warrant was for contempt
of court, but Norheim said at least five times from the bench that she had
“kidnapped” Olvera. At a hearing, Norheim acknowledged that he wasn’t able to
send an officer across state lines to arrest the daughter. Shafer said, “Maybe
I can.”
Shafer held so much sway in the courtroom that, in 2013,
when an attorney complained that the bank account of a ward named Kristina
Berger had “no money left and no records to explain where it went,” Shafer told
Norheim, “Close the courtroom.” Norheim immediately complied. A dozen people in
attendance were forced to leave.
One
of Shafer’s former bookkeepers, Lisa Clifton, who was hired in 2012, told me
that Shafer used to brag about his political connections, saying, “I wrote the
laws.” In 1995, he persuaded the Nevada Senate Committee on Government Affairs
to write a bill that allowed the county to receive interest on money that the
public guardian invested. “This is what I want you to put in the statute, and I
will tell you that you will get a rousing hand from a couple of judges who
practice our probate,” he said. At another hearing, he asked the committee to
write an amendment permitting public guardians to take control of people’s
property in five days, without a court order. “This bill is not ‘Big Brother’
if you trust the person who is doing the job,” he said. (After a senator
expressed concern that the law allowed “intervention into somebody’s life
without establishing some sort of reason why you are doing it,” the committee
declined to recommend it.)
Clifton observed that Shafer almost always took a cynical
view of family members: they were never motivated by love or duty, only by
avarice. “‘They just want the money’—that was his answer to everything,” she
told me. “And I’m thinking to myself, Well, when family members die they pass
it down to their children. Isn’t that just the normal progression of things?”
After a few months on the job, Clifton was asked to work as
a guardian, substituting for an absent employee, though she had never been
trained. Her first assignment was to supervise a visit with a man named Alvin
Passer, who was dying in the memory-care unit of a nursing home. His partner of
eight years, Olive Manoli, was permitted a brief visit to say goodbye. Her
visits had been restricted by Shafer—his lawyer told the court that Passer
became “agitated and sexually aggressive” in her presence—and she hadn’t seen
Passer in months. In a futile attempt to persuade the court to allow her to be
with him, Manoli had submitted a collection of love letters, as well as notes
from ten people describing her desire to care for Passer for the rest of his
life. “I was absolutely appalled,” Clifton said. “She was this very sweet lady,
and I said, ‘Go in there and spend as much time with him as you want.’ Tears
were rolling down her cheeks.”
The family seemed to have suffered a form of
court-sanctioned gaslighting. Passer’s daughter, Joyce, a psychiatric nurse who
specialized in geriatrics, had been abruptly removed as her father’s
co-guardian, because she appeared “unwilling or (more likely) unable to conduct
herself rationally in the Ward’s best interests,” according to motions filed by
one of Shafer’s attorneys.
She and Manoli had begged Norheim not to appoint Shafer as
guardian. “Sir, he’s abusive,” their lawyer said in court.
“He’s as good as we got, and I trust him completely,” Norheim
responded.
Joyce Passer was so confused by the situation that, she
said, “I thought I was crazy.” Then she received a call from a blocked number.
It was Terry Williams, who did not reveal her identity. She had put together a
list of a half-dozen family members who she felt were “ready to receive some
kind of verbal support.” She told Passer, “Look, you are not nuts. This is
real. Everything you are thinking is true. This has been going on for years.”
During
Rennie North’s first year at Lakeview Terrace, she gained sixty pounds. Parks
had switched the Norths’ insurance, for reasons she never explained, and Rennie
began seeing new doctors, who prescribed Valium, Prozac, the sedative
Temazepam, Oxycodone, and Fentanyl. The doses steadily increased. Rudy, who had
hip pain, was prescribed Oxycodone and Valium. When he sat down to read, the
sentences floated past his eyes or appeared in duplicate. “Ward seemed very
tired and his eyes were glassy,” Parks wrote in an invoice.
Belshe found it increasingly hard to communicate with her
parents, who napped for much of the day. “They were being overmedicated to the
point where they weren’t really there,” she said. The Norths’ grandsons, who
used to see them every week, rarely visited. “It was degrading for them to see
us so degraded,” Rudy said. Parks noticed that Rennie was acting helpless, and urged
her to “try harder to be more motivated and not be so dependent on others.”
Rudy and Rennie began going to Sunday church services at the facility, even
though they were Jewish. Rudy was heartened by what he heard in the pastor’s
message: “Don’t give up. God will help you get out of here.” He began telling
people, “We are living the life of Job.”
At the end of 2014, Lakeview Terrace hired a new director,
Julie Liebo, who resisted Parks’s orders that medical information about wards
be kept from their families. Liebo told me, “The families were devastated that
they couldn’t know if the residents were in surgery or hear anything about
their health. They didn’t understand why they’d been taken out of the picture.
They’d ask, ‘Can you just tell me if she’s alive?’” Liebo tried to comply with
the rules, because she didn’t want to violate medical-privacy laws; as
guardian, Parks was entitled to choose what was disclosed. Once, though, Liebo
took pity on the sister of an eighty-year-old ward named Dorothy Smith, who was
mourning a dog that Parks had given away, and told her that Smith was stable.
Liebo said that Parks, who was by then the secretary of the Nevada Guardianship
Association, called her immediately. “She threatened my license and said she
could have me arrested,” Liebo told me.
After Liebo arrived, Parks began removing wards from
Lakeview Terrace with less than a day’s notice. A woman named Linda Phillips,
who had dementia, was told that she was going to the beauty salon. She never
returned. Marlene Homer, the ward whose ailments were depression and “strange
thoughts,” was taken away in a van, screaming. Liebo had asked the state
ombudsman to come to the facility and stop the removals, but nothing could be
done. “We stood there completely helpless,” Liebo said. “We had no idea where
they were going.” Liebo said that other wards asked her if they would be next.
Liebo alerted the compliance officer for the Clark County
Family Court that Parks was removing residents “without any concern for them
and their choice to stay here.” She also reported her complaints to the police,
the Department of Health Services, the Bureau of Health Care, and Nevada Adult
Protective Services. She said each agency told her that it didn’t have the
authority or the jurisdiction to intervene.
At
the beginning of 2015, Parks told the Norths that they would be leaving
Lakeview Terrace. “Finances are low and the move is out of our control,” Parks
wrote. It was all arranged so quickly that, Rudy said, “we didn’t have time to
say goodbye to people we’d been eating with for seventeen months.” Parks
arranged for Caring Transitions to move them to the Wentworth, a less expensive
assisted-living facility. Liebo said that, the night before the move, Rudy
began “shouting about the Holocaust, that this was like being in Nazi Germany.”
Liebo didn’t think the reference was entirely misguided. “He reverted to a
point where he had no rights as a human being,” she said. “He was no longer the
caregiver, the man, the husband—all of the things that gave his life meaning.”
Liebo also didn’t understand why Belshe had been marginalized. “She seemed like
she had a great relationship with her parents,” she said.
Belshe showed up at 9 a.m. to help her
parents with the move, but when she arrived Parks’s assistant, Heidi Kramer,
told her that her parents had already left. Belshe “emotionally crashed,” as
Liebo put it. She yelled that her parents didn’t even wake up until nine or
later—what was the rush? In an invoice, Kramer wrote that Belshe “began to yell
and scream, her behavior was out of control, she was taking pictures and
yelling, ‘April Parks is a thief.’” Kramer called the police. Liebo remembers
that an officer “looked at Julie Belshe and told her she had no rights, and she
didn’t.”
Belshe cried as she drove to the Wentworth, in Las Vegas.
When she arrived, Parks was there, and refused to let her see her parents.
Parks wrote, “I told her that she was too distraught to see her parents, and
that she needed to leave.” Belshe wouldn’t, so Parks asked the receptionist to
call the police. When the police arrived, Belshe told them, “I just want to hug
my parents and make sure they’re O.K.” An officer handed her a citation for
trespassing, saying that if she returned to the facility she would be arrested.
Parks wrote that the Norths were “very happy with the new
room and thanked us several times,” but Rudy remembers feeling as if he had
“ended up in the sewer.” Their room was smaller than the one at Lakeview
Terrace, and the residents at the Wentworth seemed older and sicker. “There
were people sitting in their chairs, half-asleep,” Rudy said. “Their tongues
hung out.”
Rennie spent nearly all her time in her wheelchair or in
bed, her eyes half-closed. Her face had become bloated. One night, she was so
agitated that the nurses gave her Haldol, a drug commonly used to treat
schizophrenia. When Rudy asked her questions, Rennie said “What?” in a soft,
remote voice.
Shortly
after her parents’ move, Belshe called an editor of the Vegas Voice,
a newspaper distributed to all the mailboxes in senior communities in Las Vegas.
In recent months, the paper had published three columns warning readers about
Clark County guardians, writing that they “have been lining their pockets at
the expense of unwitting seniors for a very long time.”
At Belshe’s urging, the paper’s political editor, Rana
Goodman, visited the Norths, and published an article in the Voice,
describing Rudy as “the most articulate, soft spoken person I have met in a
very long time.” She called Clark County’s guardianship system a “(legal) elder
abuse racket” and urged readers to sign a petition demanding that the Nevada
legislature reform the laws. More than three thousand people signed.
Two months later, the Review-Journal ran an
investigation, titled “Clark County’s Private
Guardians May Protect—Or Just Steal and Abuse,” which
described complaints against Shafer going back to the early eighties, when two
of his employees were arrested for stealing from the estates of dead people.
In May 2015, a month after the article appeared, when the
Norths went to court to discuss their finances local journalists were in the
courtroom and Norheim seemed chastened. “I have grave concerns about this
case,” he said. He noted that Parks had sold the Norths’ belongings without
proper approval from his court. Parks had been doing this routinely for years,
and, according to her, the court had always accepted her accounting and her
fees. Her lawyer, Aileen Cohen, said, “Everything was done for the wards’
benefit, to support the wards.”
Norheim announced that he was suspending Parks as the
Norths’ guardian—the first time she had been removed from a case for
misconduct.
“This is important,” Rudy, who was wearing a double-breasted
suit, said in court. “This is hope. I am coming here and I have hope.” He
quoted the Bible, Thomas Jefferson, and Euripides, until Belshe finally touched
his elbow and said, “Just sit down, Dad.”
When Rudy apologized for being “overzealous,” Norheim told
him, “This is your life. This is your liberty. You have every right to be here.
You have every right to be involved in this project.”
After the hearing, Parks texted her husband, “I am
finished.”
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 [sic] 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. At Parks’s grand-jury trial, her assistant testified
that she and Parks went to hospitals and attorneys’ offices for the purpose of
“building relationships to generate more client leads.” Parks secured a contract
with six medical facilities whose staff agreed to refer patients to her—an
arrangement that benefitted the facilities, since Parks controlled the
decisions of a large pool of their potential consumers. Parks often gave
doctors blank certificates and told them exactly what to write in order for
their patients to become her wards.
Parks and other private guardians appeared to gravitate
toward patients who had considerable assets. O’Malley described a 2010 case in
which Parks, after receiving a tip from a social worker, began “cold-calling”
rehabilitation centers, searching for a seventy-nine-year-old woman, Patricia
Smoak, who had nearly seven hundred thousand dollars and no children. Parks
finally found her, but Smoak’s physician wouldn’t sign a certificate of
incapacity. “The doctor is not playing ball,” Parks wrote to her lawyer. She
quickly found a different doctor to sign the certificate, and Norheim approved
the guardianship. (Both Parks and Norheim declined to speak with me.)
Steve Miller, a former member of the Las Vegas City Council,
said he assumed that Shafer would be the next indictment after Parks, who is
scheduled to go to trial next spring. “All of the disreputable guardians were
taking clues from the Shafer example,” he said. But, as the months passed, “I
started to think that this has run its course locally. Only federal
intervention is going to give us peace of mind.”
Richard Black, who, after his father-in-law was placed into
guardianship, became the director of a grassroots national organization,
Americans Against Abusive Probate Guardianship, said that he considered the
Parks indictment “irrefutably shallow. It sent a strong message of: We’re not
going to go after the real leaders of this, only the easy people, the ones who
were arrogant and stupid enough to get caught.” He works with victims in dozens
of what he calls “hot spots,” places where guardianship abuse is prevalent,
often because they attract retirees: Palm Beach, Sarasota, Naples, Albuquerque,
San Antonio. He said that the problems in Clark County are not unusual. “The
only thing that is unique is that Clark County is one of the few jurisdictions
that doesn’t seal its records, so we can see what is going on.”
Approximately ten per cent of people older than sixty-five
are thought to be victims of “elder abuse”—a construct that has yet to enter
public consciousness, as child abuse has—but such cases are seldom prosecuted.
People who are frail or dying don’t make good witnesses—a fact that Shafer once
emphasized at a 1990 U.S. congressional hearing on crimes against the elderly,
in which he appeared as an expert at preventing exploitation. “Seniors do not
like to testify,” he said, adding that they were either incapable or
“mesmerized by the person ripping them off.” He said, “The exploitation of
seniors is becoming a real cottage industry right now. This is a good business.
Seniors are unable to fend for themselves.”
In the past two years, Nevada has worked to reform its
guardianship system through a commission, appointed by the Nevada Supreme
Court, to study failures in oversight. In 2018, the Nevada legislature will
enact a new law that entitles all wards to be represented by lawyers in court.
But the state seems reluctant to reckon with the roots of the problem, as well
as with its legacy: a generation of ill and elderly people who were deprived of
their autonomy, and also of their families, in the final years of their lives.
Last spring, a man bought a storage unit in Henderson, Nevada, and discovered
twenty-seven urns—the remains of Clark County wards who had never been buried.
In the wake of Parks’s indictment, no judges have lost their
jobs. Norheim was transferred from guardianship court to dependency court,
where he now oversees cases involving abused and neglected children. Shafer is
still listed in the Clark County court system as a trustee and as an
administrator in several open cases. He did not respond to multiple e-mails and
messages left with his bookkeeper, who answered his office phone but would not
say whether he was still in practice. He did appear at one of the public
meetings for the commission appointed to analyze flaws in the guardianship
system. “What started all of this was me,” he said. Then he criticized local
media coverage of the issue and said that a television reporter, whom he’d
talked to briefly, didn’t know the facts. “The system works,” Shafer went on. “It’s
not the guardians you have to be aware of, it’s more family members.” He wore a
blue polo shirt, untucked, and his head was shaved. He looked aged, his arms
dotted with sun spots, but he spoke confidently and casually. “The only person
you folks should be thinking about when you change things is the ward. It’s
their money, it’s their life, it’s their time. The family members don’t count.”
Belshe
is resigned to the fact that she will be supporting her parents for the rest of
their lives. 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. Rudy often
talked vaguely about deals he had once made in China. “He exaggerates, so he
won’t feel emasculated,” Belshe said. “He wasn’t such a big businessman, but he
was a great dad.”
The Norths now live in what used to be Belshe’s home office;
it has a window onto the living room which Belshe has covered with a tarp.
Although the room is tiny, the Norths can fit most of their remaining
belongings into it: a small lamp with teardrop crystals, a deflated love seat,
and two paintings by their son. Belshe rescued the art work, in 2013, after
Caring Transitions placed the Norths’ belongings in trash bags at the edge of
their driveway. “My brother’s paintings were folded and smelled,” she said.
The Norths’ bed takes up most of the room, and operates as
their little planet. They rarely stray far from it. They lie in bed playing
cards or sit against the headboard, reading or watching TV. Rudy’s notebooks
are increasingly focussed [sic] on mortality—“Death may be pleasurable”—and
money. “Money monsters do well in this society,” he wrote. “All great fortunes
began with a crime.” He creates lists of all the possessions he has lost, some
of which he may be imagining: over time, Rennie’s wardrobe has become
increasingly elaborate and refined, as have their sets of China. He alternates
between feeling that his belongings are nothing—a distraction from the pursuit
of meaning—and everything. “It’s an erasure,” he said. “They erase you from the
face of the earth.” He told me a few times that he was a distant cousin of Leon
Trotsky, “intellect of the revolution,” as he called him, and I wondered
whether his newfound pride was connected to his conflicted feelings about the
value of material objects.
A few months after the Norths were freed, Rudy talked on the
phone with Adolfo Gonzalez, his neighbor from Lakeview Terrace, who, after a
doctor found him competent, had also been discharged. He now lived in a house
near the airport, and had been reunited with several of his pets. The two men
congratulated each other. “We survived!” Rudy said. “We never thought we’d see
each other on the other side.” Three other wards from Lakeview Terrace had
died.
Rennie has lost nearly all the weight she gained at Lakeview
Terrace, mostly because Belshe and her husband won’t let her lounge in her
wheelchair or eat starchy foods. Now she uses a walker, which she makes
self-deprecating jokes about. “This is fun—I can teach you!” she told me.
In July, Rennie slipped in the bathroom and spent a night in
the hospital. Belshe didn’t want anyone to know about her mother’s fall,
because, she said, “this is the kind of thing that gets you into
guardianship.” She told me, “I feel like these people are just waiting in
the bushes.”
Two days after the fall, Rennie was feeling better—she’d had
thirteen stitches—but she was still agitated by a dream she had in the
hospital. She wasn’t even sure if she’d been asleep; she remembers talking, and
her eyes were open.
“You were loopedy-doopy,” Scott Belshe, Julie’s husband,
told her. They were sitting on the couch in their living room.
“It was real,” Rennie said.
“You dreamed it,” Scott told her.
“Maybe I was hallucinating,” she said. “I don’t know—I was
scared.” She said that strangers were making decisions about her fate. She felt
as if she were frozen: she couldn’t influence what was happening. “I didn’t
know what to do,” she told Scott. “I think I yelled for help. Help me.”
The worst part, she said, was that she couldn’t find her family. “Honest to
God, I thought you guys left me all alone.” ♦
____________________
This article appears in the print edition of the October 9, 2017,
issue, with the headline “The Takeover.”
Rachel Aviv joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in
2013.
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