In real life, Mary escaped from a locked down nursing home with the assistance of her family friend and physician.
So what is your verdict, dear readers???
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 2, 2017
After a stranger became their guardian, Rudy and Rennie North were moved to a nursing home and their property was sold.Illustration by Anna Parini
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.
VIDEO FROM THE NEW YORKERThe Night Doctrine: The Lives Lost to a U.S. Strategy in Afghanistan
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 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.”
Amonth 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.”
ADVERTISEMENT
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.
ADVERTISEMENT
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.
ADVERTISEMENT
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 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 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.” ♦Published in the print edition of the October 9, 2017, issue, with the headline “The Takeover.”
Rachel Aviv is a staff writer at The New Yorker. She is the author of “Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us,” a finalist for the 2023 National Book Critics Circle Award.
It is very rare to get a victim willing to publish the string of horrific crimes against them in Illinois, but Judith is one brave woman. 83 years old, Kane County, Illinois guardianship victim
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1kdhXM83_VhJGsA8vXM-bsyzzQkVtAm99/view?usp=sharing
ge —–
From: kenneth ditkowsky <kenditkowsky@yahoo.com>
To: Key Phillip-s <phillipskey@yahoo.com>; sion-from-nc-the-system-of-corruption-is-endemnic> Wasn’t That Convenient? And With Such Duly Documented “Surgical-Precision Timing.” <lanreamu@gmail.com>
Sent: Sunday, November 5, 2023 at 10:14:14 AM CST
Subject: Re: The Washington post exposes, Guardianship Corruption
The “Goodman” case scared most of the Arizona lawyers. The miscreants and the legal profession went after him tooth and nail.
While I do not know if Goodman was a ‘good guy’ or an opportunist, the public relations campaign against him parallels the campaign mounted by the left against Trump. They spit at the mention of Goodman’s name and – its all part of the public record.
When a lawyer, a politician, or someone who is in the public eye is on bad paper with the dominant political powers expect that he/she will be vilified – at least until he/she is no longer a threat. Sometimes it is subtle, other times it is outrageous. There is no quarter given.
If you need an example — JoAnne Denison has a blog called MARYGSYKES. Therein she exposed the perfidiousness of the accepted legal practice in relation to guardianship and how the word TRUTH and due process were removed from the lexicon in vogue at the Courthouse. As her practice concentrated on INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY LAW, they could not Goodmanize her, so harassment and mafia tacts became the name of the game. They really had to stretch.
The SALLAS ZOOM outrage demonstrated just how ethically challenged the FINANCIAL ELDER ABUSER political group have become. To hell with ADA! Teaching a victim to use ZOOM In Illinois is ethically challenged, and the IARDC (Disciplinary Commission) went full out to attempt to intimidate Denison so that Sallas would be helpless to complaint as to the JUSTICE being promulgated and handed out in Judge Boliker’s courtroom designed to deny Mr. and Mrs. Dean Sallas of even the most basic rights of due process. The IARDC actually subpoenaed Dean SAllas’ Google Account! (Whose else’s privacy rights they violated is unknown. Of course, Dean and Amy Sallas were punished with the loss of their rights privileges and immunities as citizens. (8 million dollars of lifetime work, savings, and **** were forfeit.) Today DEAN SALLAS lives in his car – homeless, and Amy is a hostage in a nursing home facility – DEAN AND AMY ARE MARKED INDIVIDUALS – no lawyer is willing to even file an appearance for either of them — IT IS FUTILE! SALLAS does not have the chance of a snowball in HELL of even getting the opportunity to enjoy his vested civil liberties!!
Now with the foregoing in mind – please re=read the guardianship articles published in the NEWYORKER, NYTIMES, WALL STREET JOURNAL, and make certain that everyone has a copy of the Post Article, to wit:
By Mary Jordan
November 4, 2023 at 6:00 a.m. EDT
A 2021 picture of Douglas Hulse on his niece’s phone. Hulse, a former pilot, was put in a guardianship in Florida where he lived and moved into a nursing home without anyone telling his family in Pennsylvania. (Lianne Milton)
Listen
ORLANDO — When Douglas Hulse pulled his Ford Mustang convertible into a Florida gas station three years ago, he looked so distressed that someone called 911.
An ambulance rushed him to Orlando Health South Seminole Hospital, where doctors said he had a stroke. At 80, the retired pilot who had flown famous passengers around the country could no longer care for himself.
But Hulse lived alone — as 3 out of 5 Americans in their 80s do.
A hospital can be liable if a patient is discharged into an unsafe environment. Because Hulse lived alone and the hospital officials saw no sign that he had family, that put them in a bind when his health didn’t improve. So they argued in court that he was no longer capable of making his own decisions and needed a guardian — a caretaker with enormous legal power.
When a judge agreed, Hulse lost basic freedoms: He couldn’t spend his own money or decide where to live. The lifelong Republican who had just cast his ballot in the 2020 presidential primary even lost his right to vote. He was quickly moved to a nursing home. His new guardian, a woman he had never met, began selling his house and his belongings.
Many people lose their fundamental rights when a judge places them in a guardianship giving another person, often a stranger, the power to make the ailing person’s financial and medical decisions. (The Washington Post)
Hulse had joined 1 million Americans in a guardianship, a court-sanctioned arrangement created to protect vulnerable people — some young, but many elderly. The system has been widely criticized for inviting abuse and theft. Local judges give extraordinary power to a guardian, including access to the bank account of the person in their care, despite a lack of effective ways to monitor them. When excessive billing, missing money and other abuses are discovered, guardians are rarely punished. Prosecutors are keenly aware they were appointed by a judge.
As America ages, there is new focus on this legal arrangement, especially in Florida, a mecca for seniors where state officials have called the rising number of elderly the “silver tsunami.” Already, Florida has 2 million residents 75 or older — more than the entire population of 14 other states. Many moved here from other parts of the country, far from family, and are showing up alone in emergency rooms.
The Orlando Health South Seminole Hospital in Longwood, Fla. (Thomas Simonetti for The Washington Post)
What happened to Hulse over the past three years shines a light on the serious flaws in this government system and on the hospital pipeline that thrust Hulse into it. During the coronavirus pandemic, more hospitals went to court to seek guardianships; it was a way to legally move out patients and free up beds. Today, the practice quietly continues as an efficient way to discharge elderly patients who cost hospitals money the longer they stay.
| Coronavirus – The Washington PostNews and updates about the coronavirus pandemic: Cases in the US, death toll, what you need to know about the vi… |
“This should scare people to death,” said Rick Black, the founder of the Center for Estate Administration Reform who has examined thousands of guardianship cases and has seen a rise in hospitals initiating them. “This is a common practice nationwide, and its adoption is growing.”
In court, the Orlando hospital requested that Hulse be assigned Dina Carlson, a 51-year-old former real estate agent who became a professional guardian. After a judge assigned her, Hulse was immediately moved out of the hospital and into a nursing home. Carlson’s sale of his home raised suspicions because of its seemingly low price in a hot market, and an inspector general’s investigation later found “probable cause” of exploitation of an elderly person and a scheme to defraud.
Advertisement
Carlson denied any wrongdoing, and no criminal investigation was ever opened. “I am a little bit salty about this whole thing,” Carlson said in an interview. She said she wanted “to be a ray of sunshine” for elderly people.
Guardianships are not well understood. Rules vary by jurisdiction, and key information is often sealed by judges.
“People don’t realize how abusive the system is,” said Pinellas County Circuit Court Clerk Ken Burke, who led a recent Florida task force to improve guardianships. “If they knew, there would be bigger cries for reform.”
Very often, the person in a guardianship is unable to publicly complain and has nobody in their life to do it for them.
But it turned out Hulse did have family, and they were searching for him.
Jonathan Thompson holds a portrait of his uncle, Douglas Hulse, as he and his sister, Katie Thompson, sort through old family pictures. When Hulse was assigned a guardian, no one told his family. (Lianne Milton for The Washington Post)
Douglas Hulse was born in 1939 and raised in McLean, Va., where his father was a lobbyist for the trucking industry. In the 1950s, Hulse enrolled in a Florida college and became a pilot.
Like his father, Hulse was a Republican who loved to talk politics. He also drew caricatures of every president in the last half century. After flying Henry Kissinger and Alexander Haig, former Republican secretaries of state, he proudly showed off photos he took of them to his sister, niece and nephew.
Advertisement
He never married or had children. He kept busy, teaching flying and taekwondo. But when he retired he spent more time alone. Five residents on his street in Lake Mary, near Orlando, said they barely knew the tall, blue-eyed neighbor. He had lived there 25 years, longer than many in a transient place.
Raymond Charest, president of the Seminole County Gun and Archery Association, said that in the 1990s Hulse taught members about how to safely handle and store guns but that recently he wasn’t involved in the club. “I would see him shooting out there. But it was just, ‘Hey, how are you doing?’ and that was it.”
For a year, Katie Thompson, who lives in Pennsylvania, did not know what happened to her uncle, who lived in Florida. (Lianne Milton for The Washington Post)
Katie Thompson, Hulse’s niece, said for years her uncle regularly visited her mother, father, brother and her in the Philadelphia area. She also went to see him at his three-bedroom Florida home full of exceptional items he collected in his travels, including a Las Vegas-style slot machine.
But his visits stopped when his sister, Katie’s mother, developed dementia before she died in 2018. Hulse had seen his own mother die the same way. “I think it just got too hard for him,” his niece said.
After Hulse’s only sibling passed away, he became harder to reach, but he eventually responded to calls and emails.
After his stroke, Hulse was confused and apparently unable to tell anyone to call his family. It’s unclear what efforts the hospital made to track down any relatives.
Geo Morales, a spokesman for the Orlando Health South Seminole Hospital, said he could not discuss details of Hulse’s case because of privacy laws. He emailed a statement that said the hospital works “with various community partners in an attempt to reach next of kin. However, reaching a patient’s next of kin is not always possible.”
“We are seeing more of these patients with dementia and other ailments who live alone and/or are estranged from relatives,” Morales said in an email. He strongly urged people to draw up a will or designate someone to make their health decisions and to note this in their medical file.
Hulse had not. In these cases, court records show, hospitals often turn to guardianships, even though they are widely considered a last resort and difficult to reverse.
Advertisement
For generations, judges have been assigning a relative or close friend as the protector of someone unable to make their own decisions. But more people are socially isolated and have no one they can count on at the end of their life. Even many people with close relatives are estranged from them.
In many societies, family members of different generations live under one roof. But one of the most dramatic shifts in the American lifestyle is single-person households. Many live alone beginning in their 20s and by the time they are in their 80s, most live by themselves.
So judges now often assign professional guardians, a person paid to care for someone they don’t know. Carlson told the court she was already caring for 18 others when she was assigned to Hulse. Carlson charged him $65 an hour, according to her bills filed in court. When a judge signed off, she paid herself from Hulse’s bank account.
In some states, the only requirement to be a guardian is to be 18 years old. Florida has more requirements including a background and credit check. But still, compare the 40-hour training course with, for instance, the 900 educational hours required to become a licensed barber.
Yet these caretakers control people’s lives and money. In just one Florida county, Palm Beach, guardians control about $1 billion, according to Anthony Palmieri, deputy inspector general for the Palm Beach Circuit Court.
“You have your nail techs and tennis pros — their business is not so good and they want something more lucrative and they’re jumping into guardianship,” Palmieri said.
Advertisement
But adding an independent monitor from outside the court, a frequent recommendation, is expensive. “The system would be cured, in my opinion, by the Department of Elder Affairs taking responsibility for guardianship” said Burke, the Pinellas court clerk.
In Florida, even funding a statewide guardianship database was a battle. Currently, there isn’t an official number of how many people are in them; best estimates are about 50,000. Each county keeps its own records, and some do that better than others. When the database goes online, it will give the first statistical snapshot of the system.
Critics have called for a uniform system with more oversight. But several Florida officials said those who benefit from the current, complex system, including lawyers, impede reform. Efforts to make attorneys’ fees in these cases more publicly visible have also failed.
“There are a lot of great attorneys out there,” Burke said. But the court clerk said there has been pushback from the Real Property, Probate and Trust Law Section of the Florida Bar, adding, “It’s a trade union for all practical purposes, and it protects their members and the fees they receive.”
These attorneys are influential in the state legislature, where their expertise is often sought to draft laws related to guardianships and estates.
Advertisement
John Moran, chair-elect of the Florida Bar’s Real Property, Probate and Trust Section, said far from blocking improvements, it has stated policy positions that seek reforms, including more transparency. Asked why legal fees cannot be more readily known, Moran cited privacy concerns of the incapacitated person. He also emphasized that “no lawyer gets paid without a judge’s approval.”
So the system with few guardrails continues. Court clerks audit guardians’ reports that detail how they spend the money of the person in their care, among other things. Any irregularities are to be flagged to a judge. But clerks are swamped, with little time to read through a case file that is often thousands of pages.
Grant Maloy, the Seminole County court clerk, said his office has a far bigger caseload today than 15 years ago yet a smaller budget.
The judges are overloaded, too. Pinellas County has two judges and two magistrates overseeing 3,000 guardianships — in addition to other types of cases.
No witness or body camera accompanies a guardian into a person’s home. They are trusted to accurately inventory all valuables in their court report. “There could be $5,000 stuffed under the sofa, and if the guardian pocketed it, who would know?” said Burke, the Pinellas court clerk.
The task force organized by the state clerks and comptrollers last year said hospitals should find a less drastic way to deal with patients costing them money, such as authorizing someone to be their power of attorney or health surrogate. It also sought a ban on requesting a specific guardian because that raises concerns about the guardian’s allegiance — is it to the patient or the hospital giving them work?
A Washington Post review of guardianship records in central Florida found scores of recent petitions by hospitals seeking a guardian for patients 65 and older, and many asked for a specific professional guardian.
In April 2020, when Hulse was ready to be discharged, a staff member of the Orlando hospital signed a petition to the court stating that he had “no one to take care of the financial and medical decisions.”
Hulse, like most patients over 65, was covered by Medicare. It pays the hospital by diagnosis, not length of stay, an attempt to stop excessive billing. Generally it pays a hospital $23,000 for an elderly stroke patient in Orlando, a sum that assumes a five-day stay. After that, a hospital starts losing money. A new patient in the same bed would bring in thousands of dollars a day.
The American Hospital Association said more patients are staying “excessive days” and has lobbied for increased Medicare payments. Many hospitals are also overwhelmed by people who are homeless or have a mental illness and other patients unable to pay their bills. An AHA spokesman also said a hospital may initiate a guardianship but a judge approves it.
Share this articleShare
Laura Sterling, an attorney hired by the Orlando hospital, recommended Carlson as Hulse’s guardian. In Florida, lawyers represent guardians in court, and Sterling was Carlson’s lawyer. In her court filing that requested Carlson, Sterling does not mention that if Carlson was assigned, she also would be paid as her lawyer, at a rate of $300 an hour.
One of the motions filed in court in Hulse’s guardianship case was for attorneys’ fees, including for time spent on the sale of his home. (The Washington Post)
Sterling did not respond to requests for comment. There is no Florida rule prohibiting a lawyer from representing both the hospital and the guardian the hospital recommended in the same case.
Moran, from the Florida Bar, said he could not speak for the lawyers’ group but said that scenario raised “all kinds of red flags.”
Sterling’s role in Hulse’s case was largely to file court motions. One sought approval for a monthly transfer of $10,000 from Hulse’s brokerage account to his checking account so Carlson could pay his nursing home and other bills. Another asked the court for $2,925 for Carlson, for time spent opening Hulse’s mail, arranging physical therapy and other tasks during her first four months. The money to pay Sterling and Carlson came from Hulse’s accounts, which had more than $1.5 million, according to a note in his file.
In August 2020, after Hulse had fallen five times at the Lake Mary nursing home, Carlson moved him to a smaller facility. She also started liquidating his possessions, reporting to the court that she sold his cars, paintings, a diamond ring, camera equipment and guns. Many items were sold in cash at an estate sale, according to neighbors who went to it. It’s unclear how much Carlson reported earning for Hulse; most financial details are kept sealed.
Hulse’s former home on a quiet, pretty street in Lake Mary, Fla. (Thomas Simonetti for The Washington Post)
In April 2021, Carlson signed an agreement to sell Hulse’s house with Kimberly and Mark Adams, husband-and-wife real estate agents who lived in her gated community lined with palm trees, giving them a 6 percent commission, an amount typically split between the seller’s and buyer’s agents. Carlson quickly sold the home for $215,000 before it was even publicly known to be on the market, according to the inspector general’s investigation. A company called Harding Street Homes bought Hulse’s home and resold it a few months later for $347,000 — $132,000 more than Hulse got for it. Efforts to reach the person who runs that company were unsuccessful.
Soon after the home was sold, Katie Thompson, Hulse’s niece, expanded her search for her uncle. Busy with her job and her first baby, she had not realized for months that her brother and father also had not heard from Hulse. She was a legal researcher who used Westlaw, an online legal database, and when she typed her uncle’s name into it, she was stunned to see him listed in a guardianship case.
“How could the hospital do this?” she thought. Since older people end up in an emergency room, she figured there must be a system for contacting family. “If they just called me none of this would have happened.”
In the days after Carlson became Hulse’s guardian, she did not call his relatives, either. Carlson said it was unfortunate but no one’s fault: “How does a person find out about somebody who doesn’t live in the same state? About family who don’t have the same last name? I didn’t have anybody’s name to Google.”
Thompson has her own regrets. For one thing, she wished she had gotten on a plane earlier despite worries about the pandemic.
Katie and Jonathan Thompson sent a letter to a judge in the Florida courthouse where their uncle had been assigned a guardian. They wanted to know where their uncle was and if he was safe.
On top of everything else, she said, she and her brother were helping their father, heartbroken over the death of their mother. “I kept thinking if something was really wrong with my uncle I would have gotten a call,” she said.
Thompson and her brother began calling those involved in the court case. But nobody answered their key question: Where was Hulse?
Finally, a court clerk advised them to write a letter to the court.
“We want to know where our uncle is, that he is safe and well cared for, and that his money was being well-stewarded so that he can remain so,” Katie Thompson wrote on July 28, 2021, to Seminole County Circuit Court Judge Donna Goerner. “We want to be able to be in contact with him.”
Months passed with no reply.
Hillary Hogue, a citizen watchdog, searches through guardianship cases looking for red flags at her home in Naples, Fla. (Thomas Simonetti for The Washington Post)
Around the start of 2022, Hillary Hogue was sitting at her kitchen table in Naples, Fla., scrolling online through guardianship cases, when she randomly clicked on Hulse’s.
“I look for red flags and when you see a hospital is involved, it’s a red flag,” said Hogue. A single mom of two teenage boys, she became an unpaid citizen watchdog after her own horrible guardianship experience. To get her father released from one, she paid over $100,000 in legal fees. He now lives with her.
Advertisement
Hogue knew other cases where hospitals did not notify relatives before setting in motion a hard-to-stop legal process. “It’s just outrageous. Doesn’t anyone care about Mr. Hulse?”
She zeroed in on the price of Hulse’s home, which seemed remarkably low to her, especially after she looked up more information about it. Aware of other cases where guardians sold homes at bargain rates to friends or for kickbacks, Hogue filed a complaint with the office that regulates guardians, knowing it would draw scrutiny to Hulse’s case.
Because the system has so little official oversight, Hillary Hogue has devoted a huge amount of her time to scrutinizing case files and searching for signs that an elderly or vulnerable person is being exploited. (Thomas Simonetti for The Washington Post)
Hogue, who spent $100,000 in legal fees to get her father released from a guardianship, cares for the 94-year-old in her home. (Thomas Simonetti for The Washington Post)
Katie Thompson, meanwhile, inquired about getting her uncle released from his guardianship. The Florida lawyer she contacted told her that she could spend $20,000 trying, with no guarantee of success. Hulse’s health was worsening and soon, any hope she had of moving him to Pennsylvania so she could manage his care became less of an option.
In January 2022, Carlson finally contacted the family. She called Jonathan Thompson, Hulse’s nephew, who believes her call was prompted by the family’s letter to the judge six months earlier. “I guess the letter finally got to the top of someone’s pile,” he said.
Carlson outlined Hulse’s medical problems and said he probably had a series of strokes. Because of the pandemic, she said, for a long stretch at the start of the guardianship she had not met him in person. She offered to arrange FaceTime calls. and soon Katie and Jonathan were talking to Hulse about old family trips to Gettysburg, Pa., and Cape Canaveral, Fla.
But they were wary. A state investigator, spurred by Hogue’s complaint, had called them, asking questions about Carlson.
They had their own questions: Since Carlson knew Hulse had the money for in-home aides why was he in a strange place that added to his confusion? Didn’t she see their cards mailed to his home or their contacts in his phone? And, why would a former real estate agent undersell a home without advertising it?
Advertisement
In July 2022, the inspector general’s office issued a critical report, a copy of which was obtained by The Post through a Freedom of Information Act request.
It stated that Carlson, when seeking court approval for the sale of Hulse’s home, submitted a “deficient, deceptive, and fraudulent” comparative market analysis supplied by Kimberly Adams, the real estate agent. Hulse’s home was “undervalued” and not publicly advertised.
The inspector general’s investigation also found no permits required for significant renovation. It concluded that after “superficial changes,” Hulse’s home was “flipped” for a big profit for the buyer — money that Hulse lost out on.
The inspector general’s office, lacking the investigative power of law enforcement, including the ability to subpoena bank records, pushed for a criminal investigation. It urged law enforcement to look into the handling of Hulse home and two others Carlson sold with the same real estate agents, stressing it had found “probable cause” that Carlson and the real estate agents “engaged in a scheme to defraud.”
Reached by phone, Kimberly Adams denied knowing anything about the inspector general investigation: “I honestly don’t know what you are referring to … I sell property all the time.”
Mark Adams did not return phone calls.
Advertisement
Carlson defended her sale of Hulse’s home. She told a state investigator that it was in “very poor condition,” according to the inspector general report, and that “it wasn’t safe to allow the general public” inside because there were “a lot of valuables in the house, a lot of guns and a lot of ammo as well.”
But Hulse’s family said he kept his guns in a safe, and Carlson billed Hulse for finding locksmiths to open his gun safe.
In The Post interview, Carlson said there are ways to improve the guardianship system but most importantly family should take care of their relatives. Then she quickly added, “In Doug’s case, no one knew about his family.”
Katie and Jonathan Thompson, Hulse’s niece and nephew, look at old family pictures. (Lianne Milton for The Washington Post)
Carlson did not answer questions about whether she saw the names and addresses of Hulse’s niece and nephew on cards and gifts mailed to his home. She also distanced herself from hospitals: “I have never met anyone at the hospital. Lawyers do.”
Carlson said she got Hulse’s case when “a lawyer” sent an email to her and other professional guardians, asking if anyone had “the bandwidth” to care of another patient leaving a hospital.
In February, Katie Thompson did not meet Carlson when she flew to Orlando with her 3-month-old, her second child, to visit her uncle. He seemed comforted by the photos she brought of his childhood home in Virginia, of her mother and him when they were young. “He was very sick then. I was grateful for the time with him.”
On March 16, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement said its preliminary inquiry found “no evidence” to warrant a criminal investigation “at this time,” according to an email received in the FOIA request.
Advocates for the elderly say police and prosecutors often do not treat financial exploitation of elderly people seriously enough and are reluctant to sink time into cases where the only witness has dementia, if still alive.
Two days after the state declined to pursue a criminal investigation, Hulse died.
Advertisement
Carlson had prepaid for the same basic cremation package she purchases for many in her care. Hulse’s family had his ashes buried with his parents on Long Island.
Katie Thompson received a small box from Carlson with photos and a few other items that belonged to her uncle. She and her brother are now waiting to learn what is left in his estate.
The Florida Department of Elder Affairs, after being contacted by The Post, reprimanded Carlson for her failure to file timely reports. Her penalty: She must take eight more hours of classroom training.
“Not even a slap on the wrist,” said Hogue. “The result is the corruption continues, and it only gets worse, bigger and bigger.”
Said Katie Thompson, “This system trusts a person to be a guardian angel, but people are not.”
Alice Crites contributed to this repor
Ken Ditkowsky
On Saturday, November 4, 2023 at 09:22:02 PM CDT, David Redkey <dredkey@gmail.com> wrote:
Well, never trust a lawyer.
William A. Clarke represented me, and then he went on to represent all of the other conservators.
Hopefully, I can get someone to cover that aspect of the story as well.
William A. Clarke representing me:
Then he starts his long journey of representing all of the other conservators (and exploiting me):
New law and analysis in California
Is forced medical incarceration coming?
Can judges and lawyers manage the mentally ill and homeless?
Maybe the solution is wealth equality, tiny homes, improved nutrition free mental health care and drugs and alternative therapies (yoga, tai chi, etc.) that come with a 6 month to one year backlog.
Daivd Paskulka has a number of cases going on right now.
I think the next court date is 12/7/23 at 9 am. I’m sure they will stream it at the clerk of court’s website
Here are all his cases:
Cases
| Case Number | Style / Defendant | File Date | Type | Status | Date of Birth |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 21CR0254301 | Pasulka, David | 02/19/2021 | Felony Indictment | Active | 08/29/1959 |
| 21CR0254401 | Pasulka, David | 02/19/2021 | Felony Indictment | Active | 08/29/1959 |
| 21110594701 | PASULKA, DAVID P | 01/20/2021 | Felony Preliminary Hearing | Case Disposed | 08/29/1959 |
| 20CR0890601 | Pasulka, David | 09/22/2020 | Felony Indictment | Active | 08/29/1959 |
| 20CR0890701 | Pasulka, David | 09/22/2020 | Felony Indictment | Active | 08/29/1959 |
| 20CR0890801 | Pasulka, David | 09/22/2020 | Felony Indictment | Active | 08/29/1959 |
| 20111114201 | PASULKA, DAVID A | 08/31/2020 | Felony Preliminary Hearing | Case Disposed | 08/29/1959 |
12/07/2023
Status (9:00 AM) (Judicial Officer: Obbish, James M.)
Resource: Location CR1718 Criminal Division, Courtroom 706
Resource: Location CRFADDR1 2650 South California Avenue, Chicago, IL 60608
My friend got this for me off the CCP portal but this should be made available to the public and for free.
Please contact Iris Martinez and Timothy Evans and demand the CCP be made available.
The taxpayers need this and are entitled to it.
Thank you
Here is a link to the petition: https://chng.it/5wVvdNpVM2
Our attornment with the breakdown in the concept of EQUAL JUSTICE UNDER THE LAW, or the misuse by government directly or indirectly of the Rule of Law is relevant only if we allow the propaganda to deter us from demanding the tradition of Equal protection under the law be unabated.What we are observing in today’s Justice System is a total breakdown. How can FINANCIAL ELDER ABUSE be tolerated? How can law enforcement be silent – and more important how can our elected officials treat this scandal with such benign neglect! How can the Courts take affirmative action to facilitate this corruption? Why have me and thee not done something! The parallel at the highest levels of our government is a grim and stark reminder of the middle 1930’s and the cold war! This distinction is it is happening here and now.It is frustrating to be helpless as leaf in ocean as the hurricane of corruption rages! The Lanre Amu IARDC fiasco grinds more than a bit.Amu is a lawyer. He also has a bunch of degrees in other disciplines, but they are relevant only in that the degree of official public dislike for him (we call it jealousy) is enhanced. He is endowed with a very dark hue to his skin (as he his African) and with a naive sense that if you do right, you will be treated right and Justice will prevail. Unfortunately, Amu ran across a Chicago Judge who had clout, and a defendant appearing in her courtroom had some special attributes. It seemed that the Judge was on the defendant’s board of directors and her brother was an attorney for the said defendant. To Amu this proposition seemed unfair, and he has been reported to have complained about the situation. The complaint to the IARDC (Disciplinary Commission) was not well received and Amu was accused of lying to the Commission. A kangaroo court was convened. It heard the director of the IARDC label Amu’s complaint to be a vicious untruth, and he was suspended from the Practice of Law. Of course the legal profession accepted the result. Fortuitously, CRAINS CHICAGO BUSINESS independently investigated the Judge and was appalled to find the same facts reported by Amu. Naturally this being our Justice system here in Illinois the RULE OF “DO NOT CONFUSE ME WITH THE FACTS, I’M MADE UP MY MIND” was operative the Amu remains suspended from the Practice of Law. Key – you know that I’m in 1958 graduated from a small Baptist college on the South Side of Chicago – the University of Chicago – and was indoctrinated with the credo of when you can say something nice about someone – do so! Let me then tell you about JoAnne Denison’s foray with Dean Sallas. As you know Sallas is a year younger than yours truly, and suffers from many of the same technological deficiencies that I exhibit. Thus ZOOM is a mystery and attending Zoom proceedings is not automatic. JoAnne Denison is reported to have besides her JD an engineering degree! Thus, when Covit hit, and Courts continued to operate pursuant to Zoom, Ms. Denison did not turn Sallas away when he asked for help in connecting to Zoom, she assisted him. It appears that CHARLES P. GOLBERT and/or one of his attorneys was enraged at Ms. Denison now determined unethical behavior. How dare she in deed defend the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution! Everyone knows that in Illinois aiding a victim of a officially approved FINANCIAL ELDER ABUSE crime is ethically challenged and even ‘form does not trump substance!’ AN ETHICS COMPLAINT WAS FILED BY THE COOK COUNTY PUBLIC GUARDIAN against Ms. Attorney Denison. You probably do not realize how serious an offense it is in Illinois to aid and abet a victim of FINANCIAL ELDER ABUSE to evade the consequences of being vulnerable and have resources coveted by the Court approved predators! Immediately, the IARDC subpoenaed the GOOGLE account of Mr. Sallas and dispatched a “TRIAL ATTORNEY” to “investigate Ms. Denison” and take her deposition. During the deposition, Ms. Denison expressed her utter dismay that the ARDC continues to cover up corruption, dismiss valid complaints against attorneys who lie cheat and steal from their clients, and told the ARDC under no circumstances would she ever attorn to their corruption. The ARDC refuses to provide a copy of the video tape of this deposition to Ms. Denison, despite the fact she specifically requested it.
To its credit, the IARDC did not charge Ms. Denison with any additional ethical violations. (Previously Mrs. Denison was charged with exerting her 1st Amendment Rights and not comporting with the unpublished (and denied) censorship edits of the undisclosed political figures protecting dishonesty and corruption in the Courts. She maintained a blog and refused to report on the blog the ‘party line!’ She received a suspension of her law license. The ARDC does not tolerate honest Attorney blogs that reveal court corruption and favors and they only promote special deals in the courtroom.
By a separate cover I received a generic petition to be signed people seeking to prevent travesties
such as occurred to Amu and Denison. It will not be favored, but if you wish to sign it, I’m certain I can get someone to sent it to you. (As to computer stuff I’m an ignoramus, so do not expect me to forward it – My skills are so well known that I understand that Auto Dealers have been warned NOT TO SELL ME a Tesla, or any of EV’s ****!)
Ken Ditkowsky
From MG:
NEWS UPDATE: TRIAL DELAYED. More motions have been filed and trial will be delay a few more weeks
David Pasulka’s trial was supposed to start next Monday, August 7, 2023, at 9:00 AM at 26th & California in courtroom 706. It is scheduled for Monday – Wednesday of next week but new motions have been filed, so the trial likely will not begin until late September of 2023. Bummer. Check here for updates and I will try to get you the zoom information.
The victim in this case is a mother who Pasulka sexually assaulted.
Like all good predators, Pasulka separated the victim from others in his office, to include the mother’s attorney, to have a private conversation with the mother regarding custody. When they were alone, Pasulka told the mother that there were certain texts that would cause a problem for her to gain custody. Then, while sexually assaulting the mother, Pasulka told the mother that she needed to be a good girl and do a little extra to get custody. As the mother made her escape, Pasulka told the mother that she could return after hours to ensure his help for the mother to gain custody.
A flipping true predator – using the kids to sexually assault a person and to ensure silence.
Smartly, the mother informed her attorney and filed a police report. The custody case proceeded without outside (police/ARDC) interference.
But wait, there’s more!
After custody was settled and Pasulka was no longer the GAL (but probably still had sway over any future custody litigation), Pasulka had the mother sign a general release barring the mother from suing Pasulka for any alleged inappropriate activity.
It was only after others came forward that the ARDC contacted this mother. Let’s not kid ourselves, if others who came forward were not attorneys sexually assaulted by Pasulka, the ARDC would have ignored this complaint with their usual, “GALs are saving children from evil parents. Any parent who says otherwise is a disgruntled parent who didn’t get their way.”
F*** you Pasulka! F*** you ARDC!! How many people’s complaints has the ARDC (and judges) ignored with the diatribe of “disgruntled parents”? How many parents were extorted or sexually assaulted because the ARDC (and judges) ignored complaints? We will never know because the ARDC does not have to answer to anyone, nor open their books to anyone. My personal belief is that several officers of the ARDC should be charged with accessory to these crimes because they helped cover up the crimes. Again, F*** you ARDC!!!
If you can, support this victim and show up to Pasulka’s trial. Let Pasulka (and the ARDC) know that we know what turds they are, and we will be there watching them and supporting the victims until family law is fixed.
Feel free to post this anywhere. We want the judge, Pasulka, (and the ARDC) know that Pasulka is not an isolated incident.
MG
From Joanne:
I will try to get the zoom link for this but I see 26th and Cal already has some zoom links.
Everyone should watch
Joanne
(post edited for strong language, despite the fact the ARDC deserves it)
This week, a Ms. Roisin (pronounced rush-een) Quigg was released on a psych hold but Samaritan Behavioral Center at 5555 Conner St in Detroit, Michigan refuses to release her although Judge Darlene A O’Brien issued at order that she be released on July 19, 2023 at approximately 9:00 am. Roisin’s state appointed attorney simply argued that her psych hold was a travesty of justice because Roisin was taken in 7 days earlier, was entitled to a 72 hour hearing, which did not occur until one week later!
If you are a victim or know any families victim of probate court, please print out this order at the below link:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/11PczbJxp73Vw-0asZYLdV5Js6TBpInBJ/view?usp=sharing
And take it to Samaritan BC, 5555 Conner St in Detroit and demand that Roisin Quigg be immediately released.
Thank you!
And apparently this lovely young lady is in some serious danger.
You can follow this link to the thirteen one star reviews of Samaritan Behavioral Center
https://www.yelp.com/biz/samaritan-behavioral-center-detroit
Apparently this psych hospital is dirtly disgusting and dangerous.
Please help this poor young woman who is a victim of police fraud, probate court fraud and Medical Kidnap regain her freedom today!
If you need to contact me for further information, please text me at 773.255.7608 or email me at joanne@justice4every1.com
great article about court corruption
June 2, 2023
RIP Catherine Kassenoff. The Family Court Mafia has claimed another victim. By Michael Volpe
“This is a story that ends with my own assisted death in Switzerland. Its lead up has been published for years on Facebook, in Ms. Magazine and in other media. The New York Court system is responsible for this outcome and should be held accountable for ruining the lives of my children, me, and so many other similarly-situated protective parents (mostly mothers) who have tried to stand up against abuse but were labeled “liars”, “mentally ill” and then treated like criminals. The reason the courts engaged in this horror, where they “temporarily” took away custody, my personal property, a home I owned and lived in, my dogs, my health, my career, and my dignity – for the last 4 years – was so that the nearly $ 4 million that Allan Kassenoff…
View original post 56 more words
Here is a copy of Ms. Hadzi-Tanovic’s Federal Complaint against ex-husband Slabodan Pavlovich, Associate Judge Robert W. Johnson, and former powerful attorney David Pasulka, who acted as the Guardian ad Litem on the Case. Pasulka also formerly headed a secret list of lawyers chosen for the highly lucrative appointments as GAL’s & Child Reps in Cook County Chicago. Recently, the IL ARDC finally acted to disbar Pasulka, after many years of ignored complaints. True to the pattern of bad judges and lawyers protecting one another through the IL ARDC, Judicial Inquiry Board, and the head judge offices, they only acted after significant publicity. Sadly, bad judges and lawyers continue causing serious harm to children and families on a routine basis, only facing consequences once the negative publicity finally becomes too great to ignore. In this case, the IL ARDC finally acted against Pasulka only after attorney Lawrence Thompson’s open letter calling for the resignations of Cook County’s head judges Tim Evans and Grace Dickler, for allowing Paulka to remain in power, was aired on CBS Channel 2 News. https://songsunsilenced.wordpress.com/2021/03/23/attorney-claims-top-chicago-judges-enabled-embattled-lawyer-david-pasulka-to-have-unchecked-power-in-selecting-family-lawyers/
“Aneta Hadzi-Tanovic, leader of the local Illinois Women’s Coalition, has filed an $8 million federal lawsuit against Family Court judge Robert Wade Johnson, the GAL, and her ex for conspiring to deprive her under the color of law of her right to due process and equal protection, as well as for the intentional torts “abuse of process” and “intentional infliction of emotional distress”.
Aneta’s custody nightmare mirrors women’s cases all over the country and world in which Family Court judges disregard substantial negative evidence about the father, and fabricate negative evidence about the mother, in order to justify switching custody to the father.” Mom Sues Judge, GAL and Ex For $8M In U.S. Federal Court
LAWSUIT COUNTS
1. Conspiracy to deprive of due process [42 U.S.C. §1983]
2. Conspiracy to deprive of equal protection under the law [42 U.S.C. §1983]
3. Abuse of process [intentional tort]
4. Intentional infliction of emotional distress [intentional tort]
May 13, 2023
Gamze’s State of Illinois License Sanctions/Discplinary Court Orders (four so far) keep piling up, along with refusals to comply with Probation conditions, fines, and several lawsuits filed against him, including by parents on behalf of their children who he overprescribed/misprescribed to.
There’s also Gamze’s failed lawsuit against his own lawyers, Cassidy Schade and John Seibel, Cook County Chicago Case # 2017L007185, where he whined that they didn’t get him a lenient enough sentence (he complained about $3 Million dollars in lost wages dispensing more drugs) when in reality there had been ELEVEN other criminal complaints that could have been filed against him during that same case, per the Illinois Appellate Court and the Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation (IL medical licensing board). Illinois Appellate Case: https://ilcourtsaudio.blob.core.windows.net/antilles-resources/resources/16200eea-0351-408c-8a37-c2a3a011178b/Gamze%20v.%20Seibel,%202022%20IL%20App%20(1st)%20211368-U.pdf
Why isn’t Gamze concerned with making restitution to his victims or the great burden to we the Illinois taxpayers (already burdened with some of the highest taxes in the country) for these repeated investigations? But corruption like this is exactly why our taxes are so high and people are leaving Illinois in droves. Sounds like he got off pretty easy to me. What about the Hippocratic Oath, “Do No Harm”? Wow. Talk about Entitlement.
Prior article where several others wrote in to report on their own personal nightmares with Gamze: Dr. Jonathan Gamze Misconduct
DANIEL P. FISHER, Psychologist, GAMZE’S go-to Cook County Family Court Litigation Therapy Racket crony also has his own license sanctions. Hardly surprising. https://songsunsilenced.wordpress.com/2017/02/25/dr-daniel-fishers-misconduct-with-michael-volpe/
UPDATE TO OUR CORRUPT COOK COUNTY FAMILY LAW CASE: Corrupt Child Representative NATALIE KOGA, JUDGE ALFRED LEVINSON & lawyer ELLIOTT HEIDELBERGER all abruptly, simultaneously gave up their lucrative lawyer & judge posts to avoid investigation. MEG JACKSON, who KOGA was caught conspiring with, changed her name to “MARY ELIZABETH” & moved her law practice to Lake County, Illinois. KOGA found a County Social Worker/Guardian job in Arizona. Inexplicably, KOGA still lists herself as an attorney in Chicago, though she is NO LONGER licensed. “Sex For Custody” lawyer DAVID PISULKA, who controlled the lucrative secret list of Guardian ad Litems & Child Reps, has finally been arrested and stripped of his law license, after years of the IL ARDC ignoring grievances filed.
Dr. Jonathan Gamze, Specializes in Psychiatry, Arlington Heights, IL – SEVERAL Sanctions, including: Misprescribing or Overprescribing Drugs (12/14/2020) Due to a lawsuit arising out of prescribing Lamictal in improperly increasing dosage increments to a pediatric patient.
Cook County Online Case Search: http://casesearch.cookcountyclerkofcourt.org/CivilCaseSearchAPI.aspx
Results as of 5/12/2023 12:17:57 PM —
| CASE NUMBER | PLAINTIFFVSDEFENDANT | |
|---|---|---|
| 2010L063010 | SHEILA MANNIX -vs- MITCHELL ASHER,EILEEN BREWER,JONATHAN GAMZE,STEVEN RISSMAN,DANEIL SHEETZ, Sr.,DAVID WESSEL | |
| 1993L002051 | ANN CAPCIK -vs- JONATHAN GAMEZ,JONATHAN GAMZE,GEOFFREY LEVY,LEVY GEOF & ASSOC,COM NORTHWEST,DAVID ZESMER | |
| 2014L013441 | ALEXANDRA FASTUCA,KAREN LEES -vs- JONATHAN GAMZE, MD,JONATHAN GAMZE, MD | |
| 2014L013441 | ALEXANDRA FASTUCA,KAREN LEES -vs- JONATHAN GAMZE, MD,JONATHAN GAMZE, MD | |
| 1994L006190 | SHEENA HOFFMANN-vs-FOREST HEALTH SYSTEM,FOREST HOSPITAL,UNKNOWN DOCTORS,JONATHAN GAMZE |
OTHER VICTIMS OF GAMZE PLEASE COME FORWARD!
March 30, 2016
In “Abusers Winning Custody”
All states make the unauthorized practice of medicine a criminal offense with potentially serious penalties. Since states are responsible for providing medical licenses, each state has a slightly different legal definition for the practice of medicine. In general, a person practices medicine when he or she tries to diagnose or…June 23, 2016
In “Abuse by Proxy”
February 25, 2017
In “Abuse by Proxy”This entry was posted in Abusive Therapy, Big Pharma, children, Cook County Court Corruption, Cook County Family Court Corruption, Court Vendors, Dr. Daniel Fisher, Dr. Jonathan Gamze, Family Court Corruption, Illinois Corruption, Lawsuits, legal abuse, Litigation Therapy Racket, Litigation-Therapy Racket, medical abuse, Narcissisim, Natalie Koga, psychiatric abuse, Therapy Abuse and tagged abuse, Addiction, Big Pharma, Big Pharma Incentives for Prescribing, Cassidy Schade, Chicago Corruption, Chicago’s Sex For Custody Lawyer, child abuse, children, Cook County Corruption, Cook County Family Court Corruption, court whore doctors, David Pisulka, Domestic Violence by Proxy, Dr. Daniel Fisher, Dr. Jonathan Gamze, Drug Abuse, Elliott Heidelberger, Family Court Corruption, Hippocratic Oath, Illinois Appellate Court, Illinois ARDC, Illinois Corruption, Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation License Sanctions Dr. Jonathan Gamze, John Seibel, Judge Alfred Levinson, Kids for Cash, legal abuse, Legal Malpractice Lawsuits, Litigation Therapy Racket, Mary Elizabeth Jackson, Maternal Deprivation, medical abuse, Medical License Probation, Medical License Suspension, Medical Malpractice, Medical Malpractice Lawsuits, Meg Jackson, Michael Volpe, misprescribing drugs, misprescribing medication, narcissistic entitlement, Natalie Koga, Opioid Epidemic, Overprescribing Drugs, overprescribing medication, Pharmaceutical Kickbacks, prescription drug abuse, Prescription Drug Addiction, Scofflaw, Unethical Court Professionals on .
https://www.aol.com/news/she-90-wants-live-home-162836772.html
DOUGLAS HANKS
Updated May 22, 2023 at 9:33 AM
Ela Avila, a 90-year-old retired uniform maker on food stamps, is in the second year of her fight against a court-appointed guardian who controls Avila’s money, housing decisions and medical care.
It’s a battle over small decisions — like when Avila says she can’t get enough cash to visit a hair stylist. And big ones — like when the guardian, Zaidis Alvarez, listed Avila’s Little Havana home for sale last year against her wishes.
“I don’t want her,” Avila said in Spanish during a recent interview with the Miami Herald in her home of 35 years. “I get sick every time she comes here.”
While Avila doesn’t want a guardian, she may end up paying for one. In March, Alvarez asked for court permission to use the divorced grandmother’s assets to pay a $21,000 legal bill from Alex Cuello, a lawyer charging $525 an hour to work for Alvarez in the guardianship case.
Probate lawyers and advocates for elders’ rights say Avila’s case is an example of the high-stakes consequences that can be lurking for an elderly person facing allegations of losing cognitive abilities even while they’re living at home, attending to everyday tasks and remaining well aware of their circumstances.
“One of the things I preach is guardianship avoidance,” said Collett Small, an elder-law attorney in the Pembroke Pines office of the Slater and Small law firm. “It can be a very scary process. Imagine someone knocks on your door and says, ‘I am here to evaluate you.’”
The case started in 2021 when Avila’s daughter, Rosa Hernandez, asked a court to name her guardian of her mother’s assets. A judge briefly approved that arrangement, then shifted to the appointment of an independent, professional guardian in 2022 after Avila’s son, Rogelio Hernandez, objected to his sister filling the role.
Alvarez is registered with the state Elder Affairs Department to serve as a court-appointed guardian for people deemed mentally incapacitated and unable to make decisions on their own. To become guardians, applicants must pass criminal history and credit checks and a state exam after completing a 40-hour course.
Alvarez and Cuello have not responded to requests for comment.
READ MORE: A look at one elderly person who fell victim to a scam
Under guardianship, Avila, a Cuban immigrant, has lost her right to vote, travel, accept medical treatment, make decisions on where she lives or sign contracts, according to an April 7, 2022 court order obtained by the Miami Herald.
The judge in the Miami-Dade Circuit Court case, Bertila Soto, appointed Alvarez on March 8, 2022, and instructed her to take charge of Avila’s money. Alvarez must submit budgets to Soto and get court approval for any big changes in Avila’s affairs.
Once fighting each other in court, both of Avila’s children now are united in asking Soto to restore their mother’s independence. Last month, they filed a joint motion asking Soto to end a guardianship they say is sapping the family’s cash.
“My mom used to have a lawyer. When the turmoil started getting bad, he wanted more money. We couldn’t pay him,” Rosa Hernandez said. “My brother and I are trying to do our best.”
While lacking a lawyer of her own, Avila is being asked to pay for the one behind the guardianship that has her an involuntary “ward” in the Miami-Dade case. On March 13, Alvarez filed a notice with the court saying she approved Cuello’s $21,054 legal bill for services he provided for the prior 12 months. The bill is to be paid “from the Ward’s assets,” according to the form, if a judge agrees to the fees.
The court records don’t show an order related to the fees, suggesting they remain unpaid. The Cuello bill shows a string of tasks the lawyer preformed for Alvarez, including attending hearings, reviewing court filings and communicating with lenders on a possible reverse mortgage.
Florida law requires three professionals, including at least one doctor, examine a person for mental capacity before a judge can declare them incapacitated and needing a guardian’s authority. Florida law dictates many guardianship documents remain off-limits to the public. Court clerks haven’t publicly released most filings in the Avila case, including the basis for her guardianship and medical reports. Avila and her family say they don’t have those reports.
Though Avila is described as an “incapacitated person” in court papers, at least two medical professionals weighed in positively on her mental state.
In December, a nurse practitioner filled out a court form saying Avila had the “full capacity to live independently.”
Last year, a nurse working in the elder-abuse unit for Miami-Dade prosecutors went to Avila’s house after she and her son called asking for help, according to a summary provided by the State Attorney’s Office. The nurse, Carmen Duran, “did a quick assessment on Ms. Avila requesting her to answer basic orientation questions. Ms. Avila responded to all questions correctly and clearly,” according to the summary of the May 17, 2022, meeting.
Alvarez and Cuello also attended the meeting. Duran said she asked about Avila’s mental examinations and “was informed that Ms. Avila had not been diagnosed with dementia or Alzheimer’s.”
In a prior conversation with Avila, Duran said it was clear Avila felt the court was ignoring her ability to live independently and that Avila wanted nothing to do with an assisted living facility or any other option forcing her to move.
“Ms. Avila also expressed frustration that she maintained a standard of self-care and grooming and yet was being denied her own money to maintain her hairdresser appointments and social schedule,” the summary said.
Rosa Hernandez said her mother initially agreed to have her become guardian as a way to stabilize a rocky financial situation amid trouble with tenants who were then living in the flat attached to Avila’s house and paying enough rent to cover the mortgage. The $1,500 rent payments stopped altogether in the summer of 2021, according to court records from an eviction proceeding, leading to a financial slide that now has Avila facing foreclosure because she’s behind on mortgage payments.
Avila signed documents saying she wants to put a reverse mortgage on the house, a financial arrangement that can let an older person remain in their home indefinitely but often leaves no equity for heirs as unpaid interest compounds and eats away at the value of the house. Rogelio Hernandez said he’s been pushing Alvarez to help secure a reverse mortgage, but the guardian won’t cooperate.
“Look at her. She’s fine. She’s well,” Rogelio said in an interview at the kitchen table. He lives in the house with his mother and a caretaker he says he pays $400 a week after Alvarez raised concerns about Avila being left alone while he works overnight shifts as a forklift operator at Miami International Airport. “I don’t want her to live in a home.”
Born in Cuba, Avila came to the United States in the 1960s, married, had two children and worked for a Miami uniform maker that clothed local police officers and firefighters.
In a tour of her home as Spanish-language morning news played in the background, Avila brought out a wind chime with a porcelain officer, gun and police dog she said was given to her as a retirement gift. When a charcoal portrait of a woman in pearls and a blouse caught a visitor’s attention, Avila explained a cousin drew that of her mother.
Then she walked into her bedroom, pointing out another portrait by the cousin: a framed rendering of Jesus hanging over the tidy bed that Avila said she makes each morning.
“And I wash the dishes,” she said.
She still has two sewing machines in her kitchen, where she offers to make Cuban coffee for visitors on a recent weekday. “Amargo o dulce?” she asked in Spanish as she set up the pot on the electric stove’s burner.
Guardianship laws are designed to give court protection and supervision to people who lose the mental capacity to make decisions for themselves.
Probate lawyers call it a legal last resort and often the result of a person waiting too long to make arrangements for how they want their affairs managed if they lose mental capacity during a medical crisis or due to old age.
see below, so don’t be surprised when you go to the clerk’s offices if you are an immigrant you might be given the run around for hours.
if that happens, you might want to use this letter because the clerks in cook county are not supposed to be doing this
Just so you know, the letter did work but it took about 10 days to get the documents by email, which they did not answer for days at a time. oh well
JUSTICE 4 EVERY1, NFP
5534 N. Milwaukee Ave JoAnne Denison, Executive Director
Chicago, IL 60630 Cell Phone 773-255-7608
ph 312-553-1300 http://www.justice4every1.com
fax 773-423-4455 JoAnne@Justice4Every1.com
A social Justice Services NFP
Iris Martinez
Cook County Clerk of Court
50 W. Washington St.
Chicago, IL 60602
United States
Phone: (312) 603-5030
via Email: courtclerk@cookcountycourt.com, complaint about your services
Dear Ms. Martinez;
Last week two Turkish gentlemen came to your offices to get certified copies of any arrest records they may have, or a letter stating that none could be found.
While they do not speak English well, they were sent with a letter and the clerk turned them away.
Today I went to Skokie myself, and the same thing happened. The clerk refused to look up their records and provide a letter for them. But this time she told me to take them to the Chicago Police Department at 35th and Michigan to do the same thing–do a records search and a letter. However, this is 20 miles away or 40 miles round trip for them.
In the past, I have always been able to get certified disposition records for my clients or letters. I do not understand how this has suddenly changed or if there is any policy on whom to turn away.
I would appreciate it if this was in error you instruct your clerks accordingly and please email me letters for these two gentlemen because they do not speak English
I see no reason to drive an extra 40 miles to get these letters.
Thank you
/s/JoanneDenison/
Joanne Denison,
Executive Director,
Justice 4 Every1, NFP
cc: Chicago FBI, marygsykes.com blog and justice4every1.com blog, Facebook, Twitter, etc. and Timothy Evans, Presiding Judge
Typically in probate, if the attorneys can get away with excessive billing they do.
The record on appeal is published in the last post so you can see for yourself.
F&M was appointed Guardian of the Estate. But were they billing the Estate as a normal Guardian would at $20 or $25 per hour. Heck no, that would be far too honest for them.
Instead look at the below image. They billed these Estate as “guardian” for 20 hours at $250 per hour in attorneys fees!
While most banks just bill their “trust” fee which is typically just a small percentage per year, this bank goes for attorneys fees at $250 per hour for a “Tom McIntire” and “Lori Hedden”.
If they wanted to bill attorneys fees, they had to file an appearance with the Estate as attorneys for the Guardian of the Estate and put in a fee petition. But neither attorney ever did that. Instead they ask for $250 per hour under the guise of Guardian of the Estate and not the attorney filing the appearance for the estate.
The Illinois states attorneys for Knox County should be investigating these two individuals for their excessive billing, but they are too busy pretending to the be attorneys for the guardian with an appearance on file and not acting as the guardian for $30 per hour or a small estate percentage.
We all know how vindictive probate and guardianship court can be and we know how horrid the attorneys and judges can be, but this is beyone the pale.
Here is the link to the Record on Appeal for Case No. 22 PR 12, the decedent’s estate plus some sort of arrest receipt.
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1SNuem-uKiOU62O27IeNtVnkHGAWE39Wp?usp=share_link
Fred Stegall was a 90 year old former veteran, and and Tonny and Penny knew him as a dear family friend for years and years since they were young girls. Over the years they kept in touch.
Until one day when some persons in town drug him to a lawyer and insisted he leave all his property to the Catholic Church and Galesburg Rifle Club. While the reasons for this are unknown, often charities are used to hide the theft of smaller amount of money that can be taken more easily and surreptitiously.
In this case, Fred had acres of timberland on his farm that could easily and secretly be logged for hundreds of thousands of dollars and no one would know and the lumber would just be gone one day. But that’s not what Fred wanted with his land. He loved his wooded areas and felt they should be preserved for the environment.
In addition, the Galesburg Rifle Club had been squatting on his land for years and years and never paid Fred one dime of rent, although the Club made thousands of dollars for holding hunting events and setting up for hunters. At one time they put Fred on the Board of Directors so he was part of what was going on, but in the last few years, they removed him and he was very angry about that.
In January 2022 a probate proceeding was opened up because Tonny and Penny were worried about their friend Fred. They had been threatened that someone got Fred a protective order and so they could not longer go near him; but when they went to see him in January 2021, not only did they find out that was false, but Fred was living in a severe state of self neglect with no good food to eat, everything was filthy and rotted and he was dirty and had not bathed in weeks. Immediately Penny and Tonny bought Fred the good food, got him fed, washed and cleaned the home and did so up until his death in January of 2022.
Over that year, they spent $115,000 on caring for Fred and they filed for reimbursement with the Probate Court. During 2021 the probate court and Fred’s “guardian of the estate” F&M Bank did not get him a dime of his own $500k cash estate to life off of. The Williamsons spent their own funds on Fred to make sure he had his necessities–food, clothing, supplies and utilities.
Now, Tonny and Penny have been charged with “Elder Financial Abuse”–despite the fact for over a year they were the only ones doing the cooking, cleaning, grocery shopping and laundry and paying for everything–on their own accord!
Who does this? Who are these evil prosecutors? I am told it is Jeremy Karlin and Ashley Worby. Call them and tell them what you think.
And now here is the proof we have all been waiting for–you can see from the Record on Appeal in the 22 PR 12 Estate case that the charges are false and the Williamson Sisters have done nothing wrong. They cared for Fred when no one else did. And for their loving and kind care, they suffered a false $600,000 punitive damages judgement in 21 MR 21–a case cocked up and manipulated by Paul Mangieri and John Robertson and with alleged “oversight” by judge Curtis L Lane. All 3 of the cases involving Fred Stegall and the Williamson Sisters were a sham by Knox County–21 MR 21, the guardianship 21 PR 10 and the Decedent’s Estate 22 PR 12.
knox.il.ushttps://co.knox.il.us › states-attorney
State’s Attorney: Jeremy Karlin Phone #: (309) 345-3880. Fax Number: (309) 345-0126. Office Hours: Monday-Friday 8:30AM-4:30PM.
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1SNuem-uKiOU62O27IeNtVnkHGAWE39Wp?usp=share_link
I will fax the states attorneys and invite them to leave any comments for this sordid situation and if they reply they will be promptly published in the comments section.
But as far as I am concerned, it’s time to remove Judge Curtis L Lane and get rid of prosecutors Jeremy Karlin and Ashley Worby. Instead of arresting Penny and Tonny Williamson, they should be investigating and arresting all of Paul Mangieri, John Robertson and Judge Curtis L Lane for their outrageous disgusting behavior toward teh Williamson Sisters.
We know that Mangeri, without any court authorization took $346,000 out of the estate and other attorneys were paid from the estate without a court order.
Both the Decedent’s Estate case 22 PR 12 (Decedent’s estate $346k missing without court order courtesy of Paul Mangieri) and the 21 MR 21 case (false judgment of $600k) are up on appeal.
Please pray for the Williamson sisters, that justice be done for them, finally!
The states attorneys need to investigate all of Judge Curtis L Lane, Jeremy Karlin and Ashley Worby, Paul Mangieri, John Robertson and Jacque Dare and John Hessler. Those are the real elder abusers in all of this.
This post will be about some issues when you appear pro se and how to avoid those issues.
https://abc7chicago.com/wealshire-group-lincolnshire-warren-barr-il-news/13209452/
Lincolnshire police now conducting nursing home investigation
Wednesday, May 3, 2023 5:53PM
about:blank
Those who had loved ones in a Lincolnshire nursing home when it was left unstaffed are angry and have unanswered questions.
LINCOLNSHIRE, Ill. (WLS) — Anger abounds and questions remain unanswered after people reported no medical staff were on duty Monday at a Lincolnshire nursing home.
A family member of a relative inside the former Warren Barr nursing home said it was like walking into a disaster zone on Monday when he said there were no medical staff on-site to care for patients.
As the state health department investigates any possible wrong-doing, families said they just want transparency from the new owners about what’s going to happen to their loved ones.
“It’s indescribable and inconceivable that there was nobody here,” said David Blair, whose mother moved from the nursing home. “I raced in here, and walked into what was an apocalyptic scene of people. I mean, it was eerie. There was nobody inside the building.”
“Where does that leave my dad? Should he stay, should he go?” said Sean Hobbs, whose father is still in the nursing home.
After the Wealshire Center of Excellence took control of the nursing home on Monday, family members of those inside said their loved ones went without medical care for hours.
Now, frustrated relatives like Hobbs, want to know if his 78-year-old father with dementia is going to get the around-the-clock care he needs.
“I hope these questions get answered sometime soon,” he said.
RELATED: Staffing shortages at Illinois long-term care facilities, data investigation reveals
Illinois Health Department officials released a statement, which reads in part, “We are in ongoing discussions with the new owner, who is in control of the facility, to ensure they have a plan in place for the safe operation of the home.”
Wealshire President Arnie Goldberg did not respond to a request for comment.
In a letter to residents, Goldberg said he plans to turn the facility into a kidney and cardiac rehabilitation center, adding further confusion for families.
“We need transparency about what is going to happen next,” Hobbs said.
David Blair moved his 93-year-old mother from the nursing home to a different facility after the chaos, and is demanding clarity from the new owners.
“You have a responsibility, licensed by the state, to provide care, and you didn’t do it,” Blair said. “I feel a lot better that at least I know she is being cared for and nothing like that would ever happen in another facility. It’s unconscionable.”
The Lincolnshire Police Department said it’s working with the Lake County State’s Attorney to determine if charges will be filed.
Two weeks ago, a jury in Knox County, Illinois found testamentary documents leaving farmland to Penny and Tonny Williamson were invalid due to fraud and coercion.
But those documents are not and the case is up on appeal. The jurors were mistaken and Decedent Fred clearly loved Penny and Tonny Williamson, as evidenced by these videos:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1TusCCRHGwHCMZfHarRByFoMlr4nxVvzk/view?usp=sharing
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1xxusXg_nl9dNEtuIOfRL0D0eWtvgTVPI/view?usp=sharing
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1p8iQxQS7qdHBu034SnVGmtUdJs1EFsTr/view?usp=sharing
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1C4Jdfr1-kaoWI-pwgqHzRcUUfJYgxiSm/view?usp=sharing
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Rr5rF4yaivIDUvfdWbpdwGyHx49wQbY0/view?usp=sharing
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Imk0wRTKVIdJT4-8ergL04A0UmYjsS2K/view?usp=sharing
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1dut_UTqZK2ydVheMUJg_4tzZKKJ5y8by/view?usp=sharing
And here is yet another Post Trial motion which explains as follows:
IN THE CIRCUIT COURT OF THE NINTH JUDICIAL CIRCUIT OF ILLINOIS
KNOX COUNTY
FREDERICK J. STEGALL, GALESBURG )
RIFLE CLUB, an Illinois not-for-profit )
Corporation, and THE CATHOLIC DIOCESE )
OF PEORIA, an Illinois Religious corporation, )
)
Plaintiffs, )
)
vs. ) Case No. 21-MR-21
)
TONNY J. WILLIAMSON and )
PENNY J. WILLIAMSON, )
)
Defendants. )
)
TONNY WILLIAMSON’S POST-TRIAL MOTION
NOW COMES Defendant, TONNY J. WILLIAMSON (“Tonny”), by and through her
attorney, JEFFREY A. RYVA of QUINN JOHNSTON, and, for her Post Trial Motion, states:
I. THE COURT SHOULD ENTER JUDGMENT JNOV FOR TONNY
So yesterday we learned from former attorney and judge Harry Bulkeley that the times have changed and now you can wear hats in court and tshirts emblazoned with lettering. (See blog post from yesterday)
Seems to be inappropriate to me and grounds for a mistrial because some jurors on some days wore camo hats and tshirt obviously to show support for the Galesburg Gun Club and some jurors on some days wore tshirts with OSF or Order of St Francis which is a division of the Catholic Church/Diocese of Peoria emblazoned on it.
Even in the Circuit Court of Cook County none of that would ever happen.
However, since the jurors did it and no one said anything in court, today Penny and Tonny Williamson went to appear on zoom, one in camo tshirt and a hat with a large cross on it and the other with clothing with crosses on it.
They got on zoom, no one said anything, but as soon as court started, the zoom video cut out! Interesting. the audio was fine, but not the video.
No one said anything or objected, so we’ll see what happens out of this.
Apparently Knox County does not have a published dress code in its rules and I wonder if what the jurors wore was grounds for a mistrial. Appeals have been filed in 22 PR 12 and 21 MR 21, so let’s wait and see what the 4th District Court of Appeals says.
While this blog is investigating the strange and mysterious rulings of Judge Curtis Lane fueled by John Robertson and Paul Mangieri, out of no where comes a glowing article on the Williamson case wherein 150 acres of a home, farmland and timberland was taken from two elderly Christian ladies who were good lifelong friends of Frederick Stegall in Galesburg.
Apparently this is a weak and strange coverup of the nefarious activities in Knox County, IL court system.
So read on and let me know if anyone else has had their local newspapers publish strange and out of character articles in order to cover up crimes against the innocent in probate.
I’m sure it goes on.
Harry Bulkeley
Special to the Register-Mail
Did you ever go back to a place you used to work? It’s interesting how things are both the same and yet different. Recently I went back to the Knox County courthouse to observe a two week long jury trial. It evoked a lot of feelings.
I walked into one of the courtrooms where I had presided for 24 years. My picture is even hanging on the wall in one of the other rooms. But there was a different judge sitting where I used to sit. He and I had never worked together so it was interesting to watch someone else’s way of running a trial.
Some of the lawyers had familiar faces. One had appeared before me for years and another had been a judicial colleague until he retired and returned to the practice of law. The clerk had taken care of court files for me and the court reporter had written down a lot of things I have said.
The courtroom was always known as “The Big Courtroom” and had seen a lot of changes through its 140 years. New to me were the accessibility ramps and the television screens. It had also been fancied up since I sat there when I would sometimes find fallen plaster on my chair.
Among of the things I love about the law are its traditions. Everyone stood up when the jury came in. The clerk swore in the witnesses with the same oath used for centuries. (“Do you solemnly swear…”) The judge wore a robe like the one I had worn and like the ones judges have worn since back in England.
There were some differences. The jurors took notes and were allowed to submit to the judge questions they wanted him to ask the witnesses. A couple of jurors wore baseball caps through the proceedings. That was something I never allowed.
The case itself was an interesting one. A man had died and left his farmland to two sisters who claimed they had taken care of him. The Catholic Church and the local gun club sued, claiming that the man had promised to leave his property to them. He had, in fact, drawn up a will leaving everything to the church and the club but changed it shortly before he died.
Get the Daily Briefing newsletter in your inbox.
Start your day with the morning’s top news
Delivery: DailyYour Email
For two weeks witnesses testified about the decedent’s connection to the church and how his father had founded the gun club. Other witnesses recounted how he had been very close to the father of the two women who received the estate. With all the back and forth, it started to seem like a television drama.
In time-honored tradition each witness took the stand and told their idea of what happened. Then the lawyers on the other side started probing, looking for holes in their stories. All the while the jurors listened intently and took notes.
My experience was that in many cases less interesting than this one, jurors (and judges if you must know) sometime drift off during the dull parts of testimony. But for this trial, everyone listened carefully. There were even spectators who came to watch the trial every day. That is something you don’t see in a boring contract case.
Finally, the day came for closing arguments. Some of you may be aware that there are more than a couple of lawyer jokes circulating out there. Usually, they revolve around how crooked or inhuman attorneys are.
The arguments made to the jurors and their response to them made me proud of my profession. Both sides argued clearly and rationally. They didn’t shout or try to fool the jury.
They presented their clients’ case in a fair and reasonable way. It was a demonstration of what is good about our legal system and it made me proud to have been a part of it.
The jury was only out for about an hour before returning a verdict in favor of the church and the gun club. They not only gave them the land back but assessed a large penalty against the two women. It was how I would have voted but you can never predict what a jury will do.
The judge, the lawyers and the jurors all did their jobs well. Each one is an indispensable part of our legal system, and I was proud to see them perform so well.
As I sat in that courtroom and observed the same rituals that I had practiced, I thought about all those people both before and after me who have sworn to uphold our court system. Sometimes I could see swirling around the room the spirits of the scholars who had written my law books. Books that taught the logic and majesty of the law to past generations as well as the “youngsters” who came after me.
Americans have long taken pride in our judicial system, but we have also seen the frequent and often vicious attacks on lawyers and the law. Despite the criticism, when I went back to my old salt mine, I left assured that our system of laws is in good hands.
Harry Bulkeley is a retired Knox County judge and a local historian.
Here is the link to the cover up story:
Who ever this guy is, he clearly has not read the entire court file, nor did he ever contact the co-trustees, Penny and Tonny Williamson to confirm the truth of what he asked to be published. He also knows nothing about probate law, or Fred Stegall, or Haynes, Hessler and Blake who appear to have put their dasterdly plans in motion.
If he did, he would have read the following file stamped post trial motion by the Williamson attorneys, Jeff Ryva and Teri Sosalla who know a complete different side of the case:
IN THE CIRCUIT COURT OF THE NINTH JUDICIAL CIRCUIT
KNOX COUNTY, ILLINOIS
F&M BANK, Executor of the Estate of FREDERICK J. STEGALL, Deceased,
GALESBURG RIFLE CLUB, an Illinois not-for-profit Corporation and
THE CATHOLIC DIOCESE OF PEORIA, an Illinois Religious corporation,
Plaintiffs,
vs.
TONNY J. WILLIAMSON and
PENNY J. WILLIAMSON,
Defendants.
Case No.: 2021 MR 21
DEFENDANT PENNY J. WILLIAMSON’S POST-TRIAL MOTION
NOW COMES, Defendant, PENNY J. WILLIAMSON (hereinafter “PENNY”), by and through her attorney THERESA L. SOSALLA of SOSALLA LAW, LLC, and for her Post-Trial Motion states as follows:
The real question is now will attorney/former judge Bulkeley retract that article when presented with the facts before him.
We are still waiting on all the trial transcripts. But in case anyone has any doubt that Fred didn’t absolutely love these two elderly Christian women, here is the video evidence:
Here is the decision:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1vRl0KO8iYntuoBY5pKK0Sd5db0a1r2Qh/view?usp=share_link
The decision was fair and well reasoned. The estate of Mordecai Faskowitz (the murderer) will NOT benefit from the horrendous stabbing death of Marjorie Ivy! (Not long before their deaths, Miriam Solo Greenfield prepared testamentary documents leaving Mordecai’s assets to her son. Miriam Solo was the sister of Mordecai.) Mordecai stabbed poor Marjorie 40 times, slit her throat and then “sliced her” to be sure she was dead.
Some important excerpts from this case:
On October 3,2013, during a well-being check, Chicago police officers discovered the
body of Marjorie G. Ivy (“Decedent” or “Marjorie”). It was later determined that her death was the result of homicide committed by her long-term partner, Mordechai Faskowitz (“Mordechai”).
The criminal court proceeding found that Mordechai was not guilty by reason of insanity
(“NGRI”) for causing Marjorie’s death.
On May 16, 2014, Judge Karen O’Malley (“Judge O’Malley”) named Marjorie’s nephew,
Christopher Ivy (“Petitioner” or “Ivy”), the Independent Administrator of her Estate. Marjorie
died intestate, leaving several nieces and nephews as her heirs at law. However, prior to her
death, she named Mordechai as a beneficiary on a number of assets.
In June 2018, Judge O’Malley granted Ivy’s motion for summary judgment. Judge
O’Malley ruled that Mordechai was ineligible to inherit under the Slayer Statute because, in
order for Mordechai to claim the NOR! defense in the criminal case, the State was required to prove each element of each offense charged beyond reasonable doubt. Judge O’Malley reasoned that since Mordechai was determined to be NOR! for first degree murder, there was no genuine issue of material fact regarding as to whether he intentionally and unjustifiably caused Marjorie’s death.
The appellate court disagreed. The appellate court found that, for purposes of the Slayer
Statute, the criminal court did not rule as to whether Mordechai “intentionally” caused
Marjorie’s death. See Ivy v. Faskowitz (In re Estate a/Ivy), 2019 IL App (1st) 181691 , ~85.
Specifically, the criminal court did not identify whether Mordechai intended to kill Marjorie,
cause great bodily harm, and/or if he knew that his acts would cause her death. Id. at ~47 . The matter was remanded to this Court for an evidentiary hearing. Id. at ~87. While on appeal, Mordechai died on May 15, 2019, and Judge O’Malley was re-assigned
to the Law Division since the case was remanded. Accordingly, this Court has decided several issues on remand.
First, this Court disqualified Miriam Solo Greenfield (“Solo”) from serving as the Estate of Faskowitz’s (“Respondent” or “Faskowitz’s Estate”) attorney and witness. Solo is Mordechai’s sister and the Executor of his last will and testament. Further she provided testimony at this trial and one of her children is the sole beneficiary of Faskowitz’s Estate, which stands to benefit from Ivy’s Estate.
Portions of the criminal trial transcript that contain stipulated statements from Dr.
Christiana Floreani ‘s (“Dr. Floreani”) were admitted as Petitioner’s Exhibit 7 (“Pet. Ex. 7”). Dr. Floreani is a psychiatrist who was ordered by the criminal court to evaluate Mordechai. Pet. Ex. 7, p. 150-51. Her evaluation consisted of interviewing Mordechai and Solo, and reviewing police reports, other psychiatric evaluations, medical records, and Mordechai ‘s own handwritten documents. Jd. at 151.
A Certified copy of Solo ‘s response to Independent Administrator of the Estate of Ivy ‘s
First Set of Requests to Admit was admitted as Petitioner’s Exhibit 2. Mordechai ‘s Last Will and Testament was admitted as Petitioner’s Exhibit 4. Mordechai executed his will on May 4, 2019 and died on May 15, 2019. (notice how close those dates are together and do not forget that Solo drafted these documents and further that Mordechai was in Elgin mental institution at the time that he signed these documents). He named Solo ‘s son, Avrohom Soloveichick, as his sole beneficiary. Finally, the Verified Motion to Spread Death of Record of Mordechai Faskowitz was admitted as Petitioner’s Exhibit 5.3
C. Examination of Miriam Solo Greenfield
Solo is Mordechai’ s sister and the independent executor of his last will and testament. Id.
167 -68. Her son, A vrohom Soloveichick, is the sole beneficiary of Mordechai’ swill. Id. at 260-
On Solo’s behalf, she made the (very weak argument as follows):
Section 2-6 of the Illinois Probate Act (“Slayer Statute”) states, in pertinent part, as follows:
A person who intentionally and unjustifiably causes the death of another shall not
receive any property, benefit, or other interest by reason of the death, whether as
heir, legatee, beneficiary, joint tenant, survivor, appointee or in any other capacity
and whether the property, benefit, or other interest passes pursuant to any form of
title registration, testamentary or nontestamentary instrument, intestacy,
renunciation, or any other circumstance. The property, benefit, or other interest
shall pass as if the person causing the death died before the decedent, provided that
with respect to joint tenancy property the interest possessed prior to the death by
the person causing the death shall not be diminished by the application of this
Section.
Further, evidence of Mordechai’s awareness that he killed a person can be found in
Harrington’s testimony. Harrington testified that Mordechai asked him “to come pick up a killed body.” Transcript, at 49 & 52-53. When Harrington responded that the police needed to be called, Mordechai stated he did not want the police involved and hung up. !d. at 50-51.
In conclusion, the court stated:
CONCLUSION
For the reasons stated above, the Court finds that Mordechai Faskowitz intentionally and
unjustifiably killed Marjorie Ivy. Accordingly, Mordechai and his estate are barred under the
Slayer Statute from receiving any benefit or distribution from the Estate of Marjorie Ivy.
Judge McGuire made the correct decision. In no way should Mordecai’s sister and her child benefit from the horrendous slaying death of poor Marjorie Ivy.
And the amount distributed to the relatives of Marjorie Ivy in no manner can ever compensate for such a horrid, horrid death.
And finally, I find it to be way to much of a coincidence that 1) Mordecai isn’t taking his meds and his sister Solo knows but does not make sure he stays safe in a facility; 2) Mordecai’s sister Solo prepares testamentary documents for Marjorie leaving everything to Mordecai, who in turn leaves his estate to Solo’s disabled son; 3) the documents are prepared and Marjorie is murdered; 4) Mordecai is placed in Elgin psych hospital where he signs documents to leave his estate to Solo’s disabled son; 5) Mordecai soon dies.
Anyone notice a pattern here?
Remember Solo was involved in a questionable estate in Florida which was investigated by the Florida ATG where Mordecai was the forgotten child who was not left a dime. (Elsewhere on this blog)
Now we have the Majorie Ivy questionable estate where two people died.
Solo is currently involved in the Estate of Ralla Klepak, another interesting case.
And I’m just noticing the facts. Nothing more. You my dear reader can draw your own conclusions.
As many of you are well aware, having no access to court documents, even the docket sheet is a serious and flagrant method of corruption. Changing the docket sheet and verbiage allows corruption to flourish.
This is especially crucial when 95% of all Illinois counties do not have their court documents on line. Insist that this change. It is not at all difficult to put all documents, not just the docket sheet online.
Here is the link to the 9th judicial court circuit in Illinois and no one has been able to link to it since 2 days.
Please email me or call me if you can get through
JUSTICE 4 EVERY1, NFP
5534 N. Milwaukee Ave JoAnne Denison, Executive Director
Chicago, IL 60630 Cell Phone 773-255-7608
ph 312-553-1300 http://www.justice4every1.com
fax 773-423-4455 JoAnne@Justice4Every1.com
A social Justice Services NFP
Sheriff Dart
Cook County Sheriff’s Offices
Cook County, IL
via email CCSO@ccsheriff.org
RE: Wrongful Eviction of Dean Sallas 4110 Suffield Court, Skokie, IL
Illinois Appellate Case No. 1-22-1111
Dear Sheriff Dart;
I am currently receiving many complaints from ordinary citizens and taxpayers that your offices recently wrongfully evicted Mr. Dean Sallas, age 86, from his home in Skokie Illinois, where he has lived for decades.
This is apparently part of a loosely organized criminal scheme operating out of Probate Court with Judge Boliker as one of the principals, and Elizabeth Cassanova, and attorney from the Office of Public Guardian–an agency well known to take advantage of Illinois senior citizens, force them into nursing homes against their will and then to loot their estates (e.g. case of Lucille Valentino). The history of this agency is extremely poor, and the Probate Court is not much better.
The Record on Appeal together with the brief clearly shows a pattern of ignoring the rights of Dean Sallas and his wife Amelia Sallas and that the eviction which your employees performed under your direction and control, resulted in the false eviction of this man in the dead of winter during freezing temperatures.
The record on appeal and brief can be found at the following link:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1THlVvvwisYEBuhSlJthtREc4hsLieywT?usp=share_link
The harrowing story in detail of what happened to Amelia and Dean Sallas in Probate and Foreclosure is repeated in several posts on the above cited blogs.
I am herewith demanding that you:
1) provide immediate suitable housing to Mr. Sallas
2) fix up the home of Mr. Sallas at 4110 Suffield Court and return him there as soon as it is suitable clean and ready for his and his wife’s occupancy.
Very Truly Yours,
/s/JoanneDenison/
Joanne Denison,
Executive Director,
Justice 4 Every1, NFP
cc: Chicago FBI, marygsykes.com blog and justice4every1.com blog, Facebook, Twitter, etc.
Here is the link to all the pleadings: 1) Brief on appeal. 2) Record on Appeal
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1THlVvvwisYEBuhSlJthtREc4hsLieywT?usp=share_link
Yesterday the appellate brief was finally filed by Dean Sallas, 86 years old and in extremely poor health. He has been involuntarily separated from his wife of more than 50 years by the Cook County Guardian’s Offices.
Judge Boliker of the 18th floor Daley Center is involved. Elizabeth Cassanova is involved. Sheriff Dart forcibly and wrongfully evicted Dean Sallas from the home he lived in in Skokie for decades. From Guardianship to Foreclosure and Chancery, Dean didn’t stand a chance with the all pervasive corruption.
I am herewith demanding that Boliker, Cassanova and Dart immediately provide housing for Dean and fix up him home and return him there. There is no excuse for all of this disgusting, horrid and very, very corrupt behavior.
The ARDC does nothing in Cook County, the JIB does nothing. But right now we have living proof of their corruption, an 86 year old husband and father whose life has been utterly destroyed by a Probate judge, the Office of Public Guardian and the Chancery Division, and then there is Sheriff Dart, always ready to send out his minions, goons and thugs to forcibly evict an 86 year old man in frail health who can barely walk.
This is one of the most digusting cases I have ever seen.
And this IS EXACTLY WHY I AM NOT LICENSED TODAY. I am honest about these cases, I run an honest blog and the ARDC hates it. They let corrupt and criminal attorneys run amok at all turns.
I have been told that I CANNOT BE A LICENSED ATTORNEY AND RUN A BLOG that truthfully reports on corrupt cases where attorneys freely dip into the honey pot and steal from Illinois consumers. Ken Ditkowsky also reports on the pervasive corruption, writes reports and letters to the Illinois authorities and the ARDC and JIB and for that reason, HE CANNOT BE A LICENSED ATTORNEY. Attorney Lane Amu reported on corruption where reported a corrupt sitting Illinois Judge and HE CANNOT BE A LICENSED attorney because he reports corruption and complains about it vociferously. He has tried to get his license back, but he cannot get it back.
Attorney Nejla Lane told a judge’s law clerk that her judge in Federal District Court that she is emotionally distraught that the judge does not want to follow Illinois Appellate law and her client is suffering because of it, and she received a 6 month suspension from both the Federal Court System and the State court system.
Anthony Phillips paid attorney Joanne Bruzgul some $20,000 and then got paid in full by probate and refused to provide an accounting and refused to return the overpayment. The ARDC dismissed his complaint. Anthony Phillips complained and his complaint was dismissed.
Recently, attorney Sharon Corse took some $17,000 out of her IOLTA trust account, without a court order, but a court order was required, and she too was told to return that money and she refused.
Today, Judge Michael Forti told Esther Zepeda that she could not reopen a fake $5,800 judgment from the law firm of attorney Tiffany Hughes who handwrote on a client retainer account that she could charge $200 per week until the bill was paid off. The client found more witnesses that TH offices does this frequently and the client found new case law that Illinois Courts cannot be a party to such fraud, and a 1401 proceeding could be used to open a fake judgement even years later. Judge Forti ignored all this and told poor Esther to “be sure to file your Notice of Appeal timely”. What a jerk!
By the way, here is the case, if you have to open up one of the many, many fake judgments issued by these corrupt judges and courts:
Clark v. Lay, 2022 IL App (4th) 220101 (Ill. App. 2022)
Recently, in the Williamson case in Knox County, the (lying) jurors came back with a verdict against Tonny and Penny Williamson to clear the way for a fake judgment that the Catholic Peoria Diocese and Galesburg Rifle Club could take some 150 acres of farmland and timberland away from them, again, in a corrupt probate proceeding. Numerous jurors lied on their juror forms that they had not been arrested, when in fact they had been arrested. One worked for OSF Hospital in Galesburg, an entity that was part of the corruption because OSF allegedly was sending out visiting nurses to care for elderly Fred Stegall, but during that time he was actually found filthy, had not bathed, there was no decedent food in the home, the bread was moldy, the milk sour, meat weeks old, flies everywhere–in January, old trash everywhere. So why did Judge Lane turn down a request to exclude her for cause?
The jury deliberated 5 min and turned over all that farmland to the plaintiffs. No discussion needed apparently.
Next the jury awarded $600k in punitive damages despite the fact that all Tonny and Penny Williamson did was take care of Fred Stegall the last year of his life. They actually spent over $60k on him when the probate court never gave him a dime of his own money for living expenses. The accounting on that case is a funky as weeks old hamburger filled with flies found in his refrigerator and the rotting bags of trash in his kitchen filled with flies.
As the investigation continues there is a lot more to come on that case.
But if you want the courts in Illinois cleared up, start with the ARDC and demand they remove everyone invoved in my case and the cases of Nejla Lane, Ken Ditkowsky and Lare Amu. The list of honest attorneys in Illinois is assuredly dwindling.
I have received quite a few complaints about the above case. Of course it involves guardianship and probate and a troubled courtroom. Judge Curtis Lane threatened the two elderly Christian defendants with jail no less than three times for no apparent reason found on the transcripts.
Then, the case went to a jury trial and while all the jurors said they had never been arrested, it turned out according to preliminary reports several jurors in fact had been arrested for misdeameanors such as bad checks and theft and deception.
All of the defendant’s discovery was blocked no less than three times by Judge Curtis L Lane. The victim, Fred Stegall, while obviously incompetent and unable to participate in this litigation, was required to take a deposition where it was clear he was incompetent. He could not recognize one attorney who he had just seen a couple months before, he did not know that the office had moved, he started talking about World War II for no reason and how he did not want to be forced to re enlist. He had no idea where he was or what was going on, but abusive attorneys continued the deposition.
The jury only deliberated for 25 minutes before they found for the Plaintiffs, but apparently they spent most of that time laughing and cracking jokes, according to witnesses sitting right outside the jury room.
The result of this (unfair and unjust) litigation is that the Catholic Church for some reason will gain over 200 acres of farmland and timberland. Since when does a church litigate to obtain land in an estate. They were clearly the aggressors and the plaintiffs.
Judge Curtis L Lane always favored them and their co conspirator, the Galesburg Gun Club.
One person has answered my requests for an explanation of all of this, but after showing him how the case was so very one sided and strange, he declined to comment further. Since he has not agreed to the release of his name, I will keep it confidential for now.
Please read on for the letters that I am sending out to find out what actually is going on with this case.
The behavior of Judge Curtis L Lane is especially egregious. He quashed all the defendants discovery, he quashed all their discovery, witnesses were limited, and we are waiting for the transcripts. The cases are up on appeal.
This is a copy of the letter to the Bishop asking why the Catholic Church is doing this to two elderly Christian ladies.
I hope they all come to Jesus and stop this horrible, horrible litigation. We already have too many false judgements against innocent people in probate.
Thank you for your consideration:
JUSTICE 4 EVERY1, NFP
5534 N. Milwaukee Ave JoAnne Denison, Executive Director
Chicago, IL 60630 Cell Phone 773-255-7608
ph 312-553-1300 http://www.justice4every1.com
fax 773-423-4455 JoAnne@Justice4Every1.com
A social Justice Services NFP since 2014
Bishop Louis Tylka
419 NE Madison Ave
Peoria,IL 61603
March 10, 2023
RE: Knox County Case No. 22 PR 12 and 21 MR 21 –Estate of Fred Stegall
SEEKING INFORMATION ON KNOX COUNTY COURT CORRUPTION
Dear Bishop Louis Tylka ;
I am the Executive Director of Justice 4 Every1, an Illinois Not for Profit. I run and manage blogs (www.justice4every1.com and http://www.marygsykes.com) regarding corrupt and abusive guardianships in Chicago and in Illinois and nationwide. There are more than 1600 posts on those blogs about corruption in the courts and horrific abuse of the elderly in Guardianship and then their Estates are looted by attorneys and others in decedent’s estates and these blogs are extremely popular with over 300 hits per day.
We are currently seeking information on court corruption in Knox County and in particular in the above cases which involves the Fred Stegall Estate. Mr. Stegall unfortunately passed away in January 2022, leaving over 200 acres of farm and timberland, to Tonny and Penny Williamson, two elderly Christian women who cared for Fred Stegall during his final year and spent at least $115,000 to care for him, because his court appointed guardian Curtis Ford and his Guardian ad Litem appointed by Judge Radmussen refused to give Fred Stegall a dime in living expenses for over one year– no money for food, clothing and utilities, despite the fact that Fred Stegall had some $400,000+ in his bank accounts. Instead, over $60,000 went to court appointed lawyers to drain his estate. This, unfortunately is not uncommon in Probate, and in particular, Guardianship cases where the motto is: target, narcotize to guardianize, drain the estate, and when the money runs out, narcotize the elderly person to death and quickly bury the victim to destroy all traces of evidence the person was abused and drugged.
Anyone over age 50 can fall a victim to our nation’s thousands of probate courts. It is estimated that at any time, some 1.5 million elderly and disabled persons are locked into expensive guardianship proceedings where Estates are billed at rates from $300 to $400+ per hour, which typically drains the Estate quickly and the victim is typically left penniless and on medicaid and food stamps. In one guardianship case in Cook County, Lorraine Phillips, she was in a guardianship for 5 years and attorneys Franciszkowicz and David Martin billed her $4 million estate over $1 million in attorney’s fees. The Illinois appellate court apparently thought this was okay, because they never overturned those excessive attorneys fees.
In Mr. Stegall’s case, the Guardian and court appointed Guardian ad Litem (both Illinois licensed attorneys) never told Mr. Stegall’s friends he had been taken to a nursing home. All Mr. Stegall’s friends had to figure out where he was and how he had been taken when they abruptly found him missing one day. Curtis Ford and Patrick Egan would not allow Penny or Tonny to visit Mr. Stegall while he was in the hospital for 10 days prior to Curtis Ford moving him to a nursing home where he lived for about a week. Ford and Egan instructed hospital staff to not give Penny or Tonny Williamson any information about Mr. Stegall and they could not visit with their dear friend. The Williamson’s called St. Mary’s every day. It was Tonny who had called for an ambulance the morning after January 1, 2022 after finding Mr. Stegall laying on the floor beside his bed. She took Fred to the ER and stayed with him until he was admitted to the hospital, but then Mr. Ford and Mr. Egan would not let her see her dear friend or obtain any information regarding his condition.
But with good detective work and assistance of the angels, on January 16, 2022,Penny and Tonny located Fred Stegall in a nursing home in the quad cities. Only Tonny and Penny came to the nursing home to visit with Fred.
The Fred Stegall cases have been rocked with controversy and terrible problems.
And as a reporter for these blogs I personally have a number of questions:
a. that Fred attended weekly mass without fail (when Fred did not attend weekly mass all the time, that he depended upon someone driving him since fall of 2020, and b) then his church, Abingdon Church was closed for approximately six months during Covid, and then c) Brokaw was not even the main pastor there at the time in question, so how would he know?) Prior to July, 2020 Brokaw was not the priest for Fred Stegall and rarely if ever saw him. All good questions.
But the bigger question is why is the Catholic Church and the Diocese of Peoria getting involved in Estates to try to take land from citizens via contested and expensive probate proceedings.
If you have any information on this case and why the proceedings are so very strange and troublesome I would greatly appreciate hearing from you. I am a reporter for two popular blogs on court corruption and you may provide me with statements “off record” and I would keep everything in confidence. (Illinois does in fact have a “reporter’s privilege law”)
It’s time to clean up the court system in Illinois, and I and other concerned citizens would greatly appreciate your help in doing so.
Remember that the greatest cure for corruption is always sunshine which is a tremendous cure for corruption.
If you have any information about this case or Judge Lane or Attorneys Paul Mangieri or John Robertson, I would greatly appreciate your bringing this information to my attention so that justice may be done. You are welcome to call, fax or email me with the information and it will be kept in confidence. If you call me, please email or text me first so I know you are a real person and not a robo call or spammer.
And please pray for these dear, kind ladies that justice may be done. Thank you.
Sincerely,
Joanne Denison
Executive Director,
Justice 4 Every1, NFP
Blogger and dedicated to accountability in the courts
cc: Senate Committee on the Judiciary; Senate Special Committee on Aging
fn (735 ILCS 5/8-901)
§ 8-901. Source of information. No court may compel any person to disclose the source of any
information obtained by a reporter except as provided in Part 9 of Article VIII of this Act.
Ken Ditkowsky is correct: the ARDC blew a gasket when it found out that 1) I knew Dean Sallas, and possibly Amelia; 2) I showed him how to get an email, log into zoom, watch his wife’s guardianship proceedings and I also told him to fight the corruption; 3) he now successfully files his own pleadings and communications with the court.
He and his wife have been deprived of their savings, their assets and Dean at age 85 or so was evicted from his own home, entirely due to the actions and inactions of certain judges and attorneys on the 18th floor of the Daley Center. Ken writes more about this in detail below.
The FBI and DOJ clearly know of the details of the Sallas case. They know the judges and attorneys in the guardianship of Amelia Sallas are dealing in looting the assets of married parties: Dean and Amelia without Deans consent, authorization and control despite the fact that all their assets are jointly owned and control and it is nothing but pure theft for 1) place Amelia in a facility without her knowledge and control; 2) ban her husband from seeing her there; 3) for years they banned Dean from taking her home so they could live together again; 3) they interfered in the mortgage of their home, failed to pay the mortgage and got Dean evicted and homeless at age 85. I am told he now lives in his car.
Will no one help this couple find justice? No attorney will touch the case because 1) Dean is homeless and penniless; and 2) the attorney can well expect false bar complaints against him or her for interfering with and delaying the looting of the Sallas estate.
The ARDC will go after you if you even mention stopping the money flow to certain judges and lawyers on the 18th floor in probate.
Hence, they spent hours on me when it was determined that I was helping the elderly use a computer, use the internet, create an efiling account and fully participate in preventing the looting of the Sallas estate.
It is my understanding that Dean Sallas continues to this day to fight for his wife, his home and his estate, despite the fact lawyers and judges operating on the 18th floor have how left him destitute and homeless.
He has no intention of ending this fight anytime soon. As long as he walks and breathes and can type and think, he will be filing his protestations of the horrific abuses suffered in Amelia’s guardianship proceeding.
Read on from Ken Ditkowsky:
The distinction between our current Government and that of a totalitarian government is simple. We rail concerning inequity, injustice, and inhumanity – the totalitarian government just does it! Mr Philip’s e=mail and complaint is as American as Apple pie! Sophia Campasano, Dean Sallas and a cast of thousands of elderly victims all have the very same complaint, to wit: a loved one has had his/her life taken over by a predatory guardian aided and abetted by a corrupt judge (or a series of corrupt judges) and all the agencies of government who boast of their compassion, honor and devotion to the 14th Amendment to our Constitution manifest total disinterest. Benign neglect would be a 100% improvement!Unfortunately, this fiasco does not end with rogue goverment or judicial theft – it in fact does not end until every stone has been tossed at the victim and his/her family and every loose dollar has found its way into the miscreants pockets. Anyone who stands in the way of the juggernaut of corruption is threatened or otherwise neutralized. Attorney JoAnn Denison attempted to teach Dean Sallas how to access Zoom. Attorneys for the wrongfully appointed and over-reaching Guardian and for the Byline Bank COMPLAINED THE Illinois Attorney Registration and Disciplinary Commission of the Supreme Court of Illinois about Ms. Denison’s interference with the ****** the SALLAS savings and assets.Immediately, the IARDC jumped into action and dispatched a “trial attorney” to Ms. Denison’s abode to make all sorts of absurd and untrue charges against her. To silence the protest of Sallas, they even subpoenaed his “Goggle account.” (Sallas shared a copy of the notice with me!!!). Today, thanks to Ms. Denison’s ethically challenged activity of teaching a senior citizen to use ZOOM, Sallas is even able to access Court matters that concern his interests, speak to reporter Janet Phelan, etc. (the IARDC has written that they have dropped the ethical charges against Ms. Denison arising from the complaints involving teaching Mr. Sallas to use Zoom – however, they have relented on her suspension for exercising her 1st and 14th Amendment Rights in maintaining the MARYGSYKES blog!.Mr.Phillip’s situation is particularly vexing for the Financial elder abusers and their co-conspirators. He is not an attorney and he does not frighten. He just keeps on demanding J U S T I C E for his mother. The local miscreants are further vexed as he is complaining from a sister State and unless the bad guys wish to advertise that they are Grandma’s predators – Mr. Phillips personally is out of reach!THE SERIOUS PROBLEM THAT WE FACE IS THAT MR. PHILLIP’S COMPLAINT IS TRUE AND ACCURATE.like it or not, today when we ignore Mr. Phillip’s complaint we set ourselves up in the very near future to experience his woe very soon and very much in the very near future.
In all seriousness — today it is Mr. Phillip who reaches out for HELP – Tomorrow it may very well be me or thee!
On Saturday, March 11, 2023 at 10:53:17 PM CST, Key Phillip-s <phillipskey@yahoo.com> wrote:
I have followed almost every one of the recommendations. Asked for help from both the State of Washington, the ombudsman group, DHS, state prosecutors office etc and the federal government–DOJ, HHS, etc. The classic answer is that they are sorry but they either don’t have the resources or they don’t have the authority to even investigate.
I even have in writing a note probably drafted by a junior staff assistant and probably an attorney to Kelly Clarkson with the DOJ. She is too busy. I asked for help from HHS involving religious persecution and refusal to allow my mother to attend church–same answer. As if someone is drafting a standard response–I suspect drafted by the American Bar. The response is almost always the same. The Washington state prosecutor even went so far to suggest that if my mother was on the streets they could help but since a hotshot guardian was involved “they really didn’t have the resources.” In writing!
And help from “good” attorney’s doesn’t exist. They are all terrified of being sanctioned and possibly losing their license like the sixteen fine men and women in AZ I contacted to represent my mother when Ohana took her Tucson home. Not a single one would even talk to me as soon as they knew what it was about. Even the fine attorney of a large law firm who helped my mother and father write their first will and trust here in Tucson wouldn’t even respond–his second refusal to help. Nor did he allow anyone in his large firm to respond. I contacted both male and female attorneys, some with licenses in both states–not a single one. Several angrily hung on me. There is a law school with the UofA, I have called for help several times. They have no idea what I am talking about???
And if you complain too loud, the State of Washington will pull you into court again on trumped up accusations of harassment with threats to family.
I wonder where they will build the furnaces. .
On Saturday, March 11, 2023 at 04:19:32 PM MST, kenneth ditkowsky <kenditkowsky@yahoo.com> wrote:
Guardians and Other Fiduciaries Who Mistreat Older Adults
What is abuse by guardians?
While courts make efforts to ensure that guardians are trustworthy, some guardians have taken advantage of people in their care. The mistreatment could be financial, physical, emotional/psychological or any other type of abuse of an older person or person with a disability. Guardians also may neglect the people for whom they have a responsibility to provide care. These perpetrators of abuse can be anyone serving as a guardian (family members, trusted others, non-profits, professional guardians, agencies).
There is currently limited information on the number of guardianship cases involving abuse. The US Senate Special Committee on Aging and the US Government Accountability Office have highlighted the problem and cited anecdotal information. The National Center for State Courts has found that most reports on the problem of exploitation by guardians lack empirical data. Reports of fraud or other malfeasance by guardians have most often involved financial exploitation, but other types of mistreatment are also reported. Abusive acts by guardians may meet the definitions for various state and federal crimes, depending on the facts of the case. Guardians might be charged with such crimes as elder abuse, embezzlement, larceny, money laundering, theft, and neglect.
For an explanation of how guardianship can be a vehicle for abuse as well as a remedy, see the National Center on Elder Abuse issue brief, Guardianship: Remedy vs. Enabler of Elder Abuse.
To learn about how to spot mistreatment by a guardian and what to do about it, see the National Center on Elder Abuse flyer, What if Your Guardian is Not Doing What They Should?
How can the courts with jurisdiction over guardianship cases respond to abuse?
A court with jurisdiction over a guardianship case might uncover evidence of abuse through monitoring, or a person or government agency might need to file a complaint or petition the court to respond to the mistreatment. These courts can take the following types of actions:
Besides courts with guardianship jurisdiction, who can address abuse by guardians?
Numerous federal, state, and local government entities and non-profit agencies can respond and provide services when someone suspects that a guardian is mistreating an individual. Although the court has the sole power to impose certain orders such as removing the guardian or surcharging bonds, other entities can get involved and assist victims. These include:
What is power of attorney abuse?
Powers of attorney give a trusted person (the agent) a great deal of authority and access to money and property, without regular oversight. Power of attorney abuse can take many forms. The agent might spend the individual’s money on items for his or her own use rather than for the individual’s needs. The agent might do things that the document doesn’t allow, such as making gifts when that power hasn’t been granted. The power of attorney document itself might be forged or fraudulent in some other way.
State laws may help to prevent or limit power of attorney abuse. For example, the Uniform Power of Attorney Act, adopted in over half the states, permits a third party such as a bank to refuse to honor a POA when the abuse is suspected and the third party reports it to an adult protective services agency.
What are the remedies to address power of attorney abuse after it occurs?
Lawyers may help people to stop power of attorney abuse and to get money back that has been improperly taken by the agent. For example, a lawyer could:
In addition, agents under a POA may be prosecuted for abusing a power of attorney. Depending on state criminal law, power of attorney abuse might be theft, fraud, embezzlement, money laundering, exploitation or another financial crime. Through the criminal court process, a prosecutor could ask the court to freeze the individual assets to prevent further abuse, and could also seek restitution (repayment of money taken).
What do we know about abuse by government fiduciaries?
Reports from the Social Security Advisory Board, the Office of the Inspector General for the Social Security Administration, the Government Accountability Office, the National Academy of Sciences and other government and quasi-governmental entities over the past fifteen years have documented abuse by both individual and organizational representative payees. These incidents have prompted removal of payees from the program and, in some cases, criminal prosecution. The Office of the Inspector General for the Department of Veterans Affairs also has investigated and substantiated allegations of abuse by VA fiduciaries.
Ken Ditkowsky
On Friday, March 10, 2023 at 12:37:35 PM CST, kenneth ditkowsky <kenditkowsky@yahoo.com> wrote:
I dialed up the Committee’s web site and sent the following, to wit:
There is a war going on in Chicago that is not being reported in the media. Certain criminal elements (with great clout) have and are using the Courts to prey on elder citizens. The Guardianship case of AMELIA SALLAS 07 P 5360 is a prime example. Its companion case entitled BYLINE BANK vs. AMELIA SALLAS 2019 CH 13960 , now pending in the Appellate Court of Illinois is a text book example of wrongdoing. (Appellate Court 1=22 -1111).
By e-mail I’ve forwarded to you a draft copy of Dean Sallas’ brief.
Legislation is in place in Illinois and in most States that husband the WAR AGAINST GRANDMA & GRANDPA – the problem is a lack of enforcement.
In Illinois a guardian is appointed pursuant to 755 ILCS 5/11a – 3. Section 3a sets for a procrustean criterion for determining if a person needs a guardian, and section 3b the instruction how CONSISTENT WITH THE 14TH AMENDMENT that authority to appoint a guardian and the severe limitations required by our 1st, 4th, 5th and 14th Amendments.
Briefly, a guardian is a fiduciary and as such limited to actions that are 1) reasonable, 2) necessary, and 3) beneficial all judged by the clear light of hindsight. IN PRACTICE, the guardian with the consent and ultra vires conduct of a corrupt judge becomes the alter ego of the victim ward, and the sorry individual is left, homeless, helpless, friendless and segregated i for not only her/his savings but isolated without hope.
Taking the Sallas case as an example, the appointment of a guardian was done without any finding of facts and law by the Judge as to specifics required by statute. No matter, two guardians were appointed. One guardian recognized that its appointment was wrongful and resigned. No problem, a second guardian was appointed. case 07 P 5360. No matter, the beat went on. The 8 million dollars plus in assets saved by Mr. and Mrs. Sallas has all disappeared (even though there was no authority for any guardian to touch marital assets or the assets of Mr. Sallas. Mrs. Sallas is in a nursing home, toothless and with limited mobility. Her husband is homeless, and on charity. Their half million dollar valued home in Skokie, which in 2018 had a mortgage of about $175,000.00 is gone by foreclosure. Thanks to the Byline Bank and the Cook County public guardian without borrowing a dime, the debt grew by about $200,000.00 and was sold at a foreclosure suit.
Remedial legislation designed to protect people like Mr. and Mrs. Sallas were ignored — it seems that this elderly couple – in their 80’s signed commercial loan documents. Mrs. Sallas signature was an overt crime pursuant to 755 ILCS 5/11a – 22.
The actions of the guardian, the supervising judge, and the Byline Bank all (in my opinion) violated 720 ILCS 5/17 -56 – another remedial statute.
Not only has every attorney been intimidated by the Illinois Attorney Registration and Disciplinary Commission of the Illinois Supreme Court, but no law enforcement agency will enforce the statutes protecting the elderly. As an example, The CFPB is reported as informing Mr. Sallas that as he and his wife signed documents that were “commercial” the agency could not help them!!!!
The Byline Bank’s conduct herein is reprehensible – they and their “assignees” knowing that their conduct was REPREHENSIBLE had Dean Sallas thrown out of his home. Of course, the court and law enforcement are silent! Benign neglect would be a major step forward.THE FOREGOING IS ALL OLD HAT, BUT MR. & MRS. SALLAS ARE STILL CAPTIVES & STILL BEING DEPRIVED OF THEIR BASIC HUMAN RIGHTS! It is very frustrating knowing that there are statutory remedies but noting that they are all a facade. If a lawyer can be found who has the courage to assert the human rights of the designated victim of this heinous criminal conduct emanating right from the bench, the ILLINOIS ATTORNEY REGISTRATION AND DISCIPLINARY COMMISSION of the SUPREME COURT OF ILLINOIS will accuse the lawyer of lying et al and the lawyer will be granted a kangaroo trial and suspended from the practice of law.
LAW ENFORCEMENT finds one excuse after another as to WHY enforcement of the law cannot occur to protect grandma and grandpa from the predators – thus, law enforcement is out to lunch!.
The committee has GAO reports reporting this travesty and ignores them. So why did I send anything to the Committee?
HOPE SPRING ETERNAL! I cannot believe that the government of the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA no longer gives a damn about its citizens and we no longer count! Certainly we do not count in Cook County, Illinois!
I wonder why the government of Chicago/Cook County, Illinois even bothers with a vote for the mayor of Chicago?????
Ken Ditkowsky
On Thursday, March 9, 2023 at 03:25:55 PM CST, kenneth ditkowsky <kenditkowsky@yahoo.com> wrote:
Guardianship abuse is about as pervasive and venal as can be imagined. The only thing missing in the Sallas case are JACK BOOTS, and railway freight cares packed with people. Respect for the Rule of Law and the Constitutional protections of the 1st, 4th, 5th and 14th Amendments are in stark evidence. Statutory limitations are routinely ignored, and the miscreants are not shy in making it very clear that their object is not to assist the elderly who fall into their custody, but to exploit them.
The cries of Sallas, and Campasano to Judge Boliker are not only ignored but ridiculed. Albert Campasano 2021 P 3717 (Cook County, Illinois Circuit Court) is a veteran – on the one hand they thank for his service, and other the hand they deny him the very friends that he fought for – going so low as to take his sundry possessions and that of his wife. (Of course, they do not recognize his wife, or the limitations of 755 ILCS 5/11a – 3 b.) The credo – is Albert and Sophia have a few dollars – the dollars are better served in the pockets of *****,
Relative to Sallas 07 P 5360 (mortgage foreclosure 2019 CH 13960 on appeal as 1 – 22 -111, a draft of Dean Sallas brief to the Appellate Court of Illinois is instructive, to wit:
Introduction.
This is an Appeal from a Summary Judgment Order of foreclosure and Sale in direct derogation of current remedial legislation designed by the Illinois Legislature to abrogate Financial Elder Abuse of vulnerable citizens such as the elderly vulnerable defendants herein, i.e. Dean Sallas (age 85) and Amelia Sallas (approx. age 80) who were married for more than ½ a century. (see 720 ILCS 5/17 -56)
This particular appeal is unique in that.”
1. The complaint C 24 filed herein, and the record in general appears to be devoid of any averment of any assignment of the security agreement sought to be foreclosed to the initial plaintiff Byline Bank. It is therefore respectfully suggested that the Byline Bank has no standing to bring this foreclosure suit.
2. That the Guardian appointed for Mrs. Sallas is a fiduciary who breached his relationship toward Mrs. Sallas in that he did not raise as a defense the Financial Elder Abuse protective statutes 720 ILCS 5/17 -56 and in particular to this foreclosure proceeding, did not raise a defense the fact the 755 ILCS 5/11a – 22 voids any attempt by the holder of an agreement signed by such a person as Mrs. Sallas to foreclosure or otherwise collect on an obligation evidenced by a document signed in violation of the said section 22. Mrs. Sallas, is a necessary party to this foreclosure action – however pursuant to the aforesaid 755 ILCS 5/11a – 22
3. That as part of the Motion for Summary Judgment C 485 , the plaintiff presents a Petition presented by the Guardian in case 07 P 5360, entitled in Re: Amelia Sallas C 371 wherein the Guardian for Mrs. Sallas appears to make some serious omission of fact and law. In particular, knowing that 755 ILCS 5/11a – 22 as violated by Byline Bank on January 25, 2018 the Guardian makes no mention of said fact. Instead the Guardian requests the Court for permission to enter into the very wrongful and ultra vires contract voided Section 22 and most importantly – a criminal offense for Byline Bank to enter into. (It is respectfully submitted that this action by the Guardian, appearing to be represented by the Byline Bank as attornment to the crime by the Court invokes the Himmel case and 18 USCA 4 reporting to law enforcement requirements.
4. That without a scintilla of proof as to either the Standing of the plaintiff to pursue this foreclosure, or mesne debts appearing to have been long abandoned by 3rd persons, the plaintiff was not only allowed to have such stranger debts added to the judgment, but to do so by a Summary Judgment entered prior to the defendant Sallas having an opportunity to take discovery, or file defenses and counterclaims to the instant foreclosure complaint objected to.
5. That without any indication that the plaintiff made any disclosures required by Federal and States law C 27, the balance due as of the date of the alleged default was set $152,607.00, but the judgment for more than $200,000 in excess. Note: The initial principal balance due when Mr. and Mrs. Signed the loan documents to be $173, 366 (C67) dated January 25, 2018.[1] .
Notwithstanding a continuing objection as to the standing of the Byline Bank to bring this foreclosure action herein, this commercial loan document was signed by both Mr. and Mrs. Sallas on January 25, 2018. And the said agreement appears of record as exhibit H attached to the complaint filed herein (C24) Stripped to its primary issue and concern, this appeal raises the pressing issue of whether or not the Chancery (Equity) Division of the trial court attorns to and countenances the Financial Elder Abuse clearly barred by its own rules, 755 ILCS 5/11a – 22, and 720 ILCS 5/17 – 56.
The casual deceptions of the Byline Bank et al herein, not only as to the initial service of process on Dean Sallas (C201 ), the Petition of February 15, 2018 (C371 ), amounts due and owing C636, omission of assignment by Plaza Bank to Byline Bank , affidavit of Attorney fees C 727, casual characterization of predatory mortgage as a legitimate loan arrangement rather rank FINANCIAL ELDER ABUSE of the most predatory nature, cannot be tolerated. The commercial loan aside the efficacy of the Judicial system required pursuant to Article 1 Section 12 of the Illinois Constitution is challenged by disrespect for integrity, decency, and honor by the decisions in this case and the EVICTION from his home of Dean Sallas. Allowing such predation as renders Sallas homeless and vulnerable and denies him his human and vested civil rights.
Table of Authorities
1. Statutes:
a. 755 ILCS 5/11a – 20
b. 720 ILCS 5/17 – 56[i]
2. Cases
a. In re: Neprozatis
b. In re: Himmel
c. Wambaugh vs. Parsons.
ISSUES PRESENTED FOR APPEAL.
The instant appeal is distinguishable from most appeals that are brought to this Court as the Appellant, Dean Sallas, is not only pro se, but elderly (age 85) l Mr. Sallas’ wife (and codefendant) has become a victim of a predatory guardianship, wrongful isolation, and worse. Sallas’ Constitutional Rights have been overtly and repeatedly violated, and it is respectfully suggested that Mrs. Sallas’ Court appointed Guardian in these proceedings abdicated the responsibility he claims. (see Petition of Feb 15, 2018 (c ) See also Wambaugh vs. Parson .
Pursuant to the criteria of the Himmel decision, the clear words of the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution and the statute that provides for appointing a guardian, i.e. 755 ILCS 5/11a – 3, this Court is placed on notice that the plenary Guardian’s appointment and assignment are severely limited solely to the property vested solely of Mrs. Sallas but not to any property of Mr. Sallas, including but not limited to his interest in the marital property of the parties. The Guardian is not appointed to be the alter-ego of Mrs. Sallas and his appointment gives him no jurisdiction concerning either Appellant Dean Sallas or Sallas’ property interests. In fact the Guardian’s “power” is severely limited to acts specifically granted in the statute of those only to the extent that said ‘powers’ are 1) reasonable, 2) necessary and 3 benefit the individual who is designated his ward.
That said, the Guardian is a fiduciary, and he owes to Mrs. Sallas the highest brand of fidelity, integrity, and honesty possible. 755 ILCS 5/11a- 3 and the 1st, 4th,5th, and 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution further embellish define and limit the guardian’s responsibility. In a similar manner, this Court is placed upon notice that the affidavits submitted to the Court by the Attorney’s for the Byline Bank praying for a reimbursement of attorney fees for their client are patently absurd – and this Court on the record substantially reduced the claim for attorney fees.
The Appellant respectfully suggests that he at 85 years of age, and his wife at years of age are classic victims of Financial Elder Abuse perpetrated in the Circuit Court of Cook County, Illinois.
Issue 1. Do statutory and common law protections against abusive and predatory lending practices have meaning in Foreclosure of Mortgage proceedings.
Issue 2. What are the criteria for the entry of Summary Judgment. In particular can Summary Judgment be entered while there is pending a Motion to Dismiss filed by plaintiff and prior to the defendant being given an opportunity to do discovery, file counterclaims or defenses to the pleadings of the plaintiff.
Issue 3. Does the Court in a home mortgage foreclosure have to protect senior citizens from clear abuse by lenders. In simple terms do the hallowed principles of Equity and Justice apply.
STATEMENT OF FACTS
That essential parties to this case are:
1) Appellant, Dean Sallas. He is the spouse of Amelia Sallas for more than ½ a century. Mr. and Mrs. Sallas are the homeowners of the property subject to the Byline Bank foreclosure action herein.
2) Mrs. Amelia Sallas In the related cases of In re: Amelia Sallas 07 P 5360 the Circuit Court of Cook County on******* entered an order finding the Amelia Sallas as a disabled person and in need of a Guardian of her person and her property. Both Mr. and Mrs. Sallas resided in the “property” under foreclosure until approximately ( C ) .
3) Byline Bank (and is claimed assignees). The plaintiff herein. (NB. Without evidence being submitted the appellant of a proper assignment of the collateral from the initial lender to the Byline Bank, defendant does not concede the Byline Bank has standing to bring this foreclosure).
4) The Cook County Public Guardian. Mr. Golbert was appointed plenary guardian for Mrs. Sallas after a series of mesne transactions and appointments.
On January 25, 2018 the Byline Bank, being fully aware of the prohibitions of 755 ILCS 5/11a – 22 in derogation of the statutory prohibition demanded and obtained the signature of both Mr. Dean Sallas, and Mrs. Amelia Sallas on a Commercial loan document connoting that the signatories owed the Byline Bank the sum of $$173, 366dollars and was required to repay to the Byline Bank that sum at the rate of dollars per month at an interest rate of %. This loan was secured by the borrower’s home. (C 67) This document is the basic document upon which this collection action is based. A prior security agreement in favor of a stranger to these proceedings is sought to be foreclosed.
On January 25, 2018, all parties knew that amongst the Illinois Statutes was 755 ILCS 5/11a – 22. In words and phrases section 22 states:
(755 ILCS 5/11a-22) (from Ch. 110 1/2, par. 11a-22) Sec. 11a-22. Trade and contracts with a person with a disability.
(a) Anyone who by trading with, bartering, gaming or any other device, wrongfully possesses himself of any property of a person known to be a person with a disability commits a Class A misdemeanor.(b) Every note, bill, bond or other contract by any person for whom a plenary guardian has been appointed or who is adjudged to be unable to so contract is void as against that person and his estate, but a person making a contract with the person so adjudged is bound thereby.(Source: P.A. 99-143, eff. 7-27-15.)
On February 15, 2018 it appears of record in the plaintiff/appellee’s MOTION FOR SUMMARY JUDGMENT and in case 07 P 5360 (C 371) that the Cook County Guardian (the plenary guardian appointed to protect Amy Sallas) appeared before Judge Boliker by petition dated said date to seek to authorization execute commercial loan documents noted supra and appearing as exhibit H attached to the complaint. Dishonestly, the Guardian’s petition to the Court and presentation did not disclose that on January 25, 2018, the Byline Bank had in direct violation of 755 ILCS 5/11a – 22 had obtained the signature of his ward. Mrs. Amy Sallas, the wife of the Appellant. [N.B The Guardian, having a duty of disclosure to the Court, and a fiduciary duty to Mrs. Sallas, did not inform the Court that the actions of the Byline Bank were a serious violation of the law prohibited by 755 ILCS 5/11a – 22 and the Financial Elder Abuse Statutes. The Petition submitted in words and phrases asked for permission for Guardian to sign the Byline Bank papers. (c371)]
Subsequently, by a series of mesne transactions the Guardian removed from the marital funds of Mr. and Mrs. Sallas approximately $40,000.00 and according to the Summary Judgement documents (c 377 )paid the same over to the Byline Bank apparently reducing the balance due to about approximately $153,000.
The Byline Bank on or about filed this foreclosure suit on or about . On or about a Motion to Quash to false return of summons on Dean Sallas was filed, C . and granted on C .[2] On Dean Sallas filed a MOTION TO DISMISS C .on raising the issues of unclean hands, and pointing out the irregularities in this proceeding. This Motion was denied on .C .
The Counter to the defendant’s Motion to Dismiss was a Motion for Summary Judgment.C . Even though prior to the ability of the defendant to take discovery, asset defenses, answer the complaint, the trial court on . in the Amount of total sum of dollars granted the motion and ordered the foreclosure sale of the subject real estate.C . This Summary Judgment order accepted affidavits from the Byline Bank that were in conflict with the actions and or demeanor of the Byline Bank and in the case of the claim for attorneys overtly absurd. (NB. The full claim for attorney fees of approximately $41,000.00 was rejected by the court but $ of attorney fees was granted for the proceeding not out of the discovery stage.C , C )
On or about , the Byline Bank successfully petitioned to the trial court for leave to the Court for the Court to recognize an assignment of interest to and the change the name of the case eliminating the Byline Bank from the title C .. Sallas protested that such would bar him from asserting any counterclaimsC or affirmative defenses he might have against the Byline Bank. The Court on entered an order that in words and phrases C stated:
A judicial sale was held on , the sum $ was bid, This sale was confirmed on , and on C the defendant Dean Sallas filed his notice of Appeal.
N.B. At all-time relevant the title to the subject real estate is vested (though a land trust arrangement) as the marital property of both Amelia Sallas and Dean Sallas. A search of case 07 P 5360 does not indicate that at any time the Guardian appointed for Mrs. Sallas (Amelia)or any other person or entity was granted a quit claim deed or other conveyance of Mrs. Sallas marital interest in her home. [3]
ARGUMENT
The appellant Dean Sallas (age 85) is pro-se and apologizes in advance as to his lack of legal skills and any deficiencies in his presentation or brief.
APPELLANT & HIS SPOUSE AS SENIOR CITIZENS, WHO HAVE BEEN MARRIED FOR MORE THAN ½ A CENTURY, AND WHO ARE BOTH AGED 80 PLUS ARE ENTITLED TO NOT ONLY THEIR 14TH AMENDMENT TO THE UNITED STATES CONSTITUTION RIGHTS, BUT THE REMEDIAL PROTECTIONS AFFORED THE TO VULNERABLE SENIOR CITIZENS. AND THE APPLICATION OF THE HISTORICAL PRINCIPLES OF EQUITY
Illinois in Article 1 Section 12 of its CONSTITUTION of 1970 states:
SECTION 12. RIGHT TO REMEDY AND JUSTICE
Every person shall find a certain remedy in the laws for
all injuries and wrongs which he receives to his person,
privacy, property or reputation. He shall obtain justice by
law, freely, completely, and promptly.
A foreclosure action, such as the instant action is an Equity/Chancery action and addresses the issues to the conscience of the sovereign and thus requires parties seeking relief to not only do equity, but to come to the Court with ‘clean hands.’
The Appellee (Byline Bank) demonstrates a callous disregard for these principles in the ‘key document’ required by this foreclosure – the loan document. This loan document was executed by the Byline Bank and Amelia Sallas in direct violation of 755 ILCS 5/11a – 22 which in clearly obviates the right to a Foreclosure. The statute stating.
(755 ILCS 5/11a-22) (from Ch. 110 1/2, par. 11a-22)
Sec. 11a-22. Trade and contracts with a person with a disability.
(a) Anyone who by trading with, bartering, gaming or any other device, wrongfully possesses himself of any property of a person known to be a person with a disability commits a Class A misdemeanor.
(b) Every note, bill, bond or other contract by any person for whom a plenary guardian has been appointed or who is adjudged to be unable to so contract is void as against that person and his estate, but a person making a contract with the person so adjudged is bound thereby.
(Source: P.A. 99-143, eff. 7-27-15.)
The total record herein including but not limited thereto the MOTION FOR SUMMARY JUDGMENT clearly indicates that Mrs. Sallas, a necessary party to any foreclosure action concerning her home, was adjudicated a disabled person, and a Guardian was appointed to protect her personal interests. A clear criminal violation of section 22 occurred on January 25, 2018 that cannot be swept under the rug, or buried with a multitude of copies of documents such as filed herein by the Byline Bank.
The record is devoid of any mitigating circumstances that might obviate the enforcement of State and Federal financial elder abuse legislative protections or justify the Circuit Court in ignoring its own heritage and core principles.
Indeed, the case of In re: Neprozatis , makes it very clear that in Illinois Equity Courts if it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, has feathers like a duck it is indeed a duck. Indeed, 720 ILCS 5/17- 56 similarly decrees that entities that have the ability to subject an individual to Financial Elder Abuse are not under Illinois law free to use the facilities of Illinois Courts to do so. That statute renders such persons not only subject to triple damages and attorney’s fees, but the burden of proof is reduced from clear and convincing to preponderance of the evidence.
The case Wambaugh vs. Parsons , addresses the fiduciary duty of a guardian. The case is relevant along with Struck vs. Cook County Public Guardian , tolay emphasis upon the fact that the Court (i.e. the Circuit Court of Cook County, and the judicial establishment recognizes that a guardianship is a ‘thin ice’ situation as in a parens patrie matter requires strict integrity, decency, and statutory compliance so as to not infringe of the basic protections of the Federal Constitution, the Illinois Constitution and most importantly the 14th Amendment. A Guardian’s power is thus severely limited solely to his specifically published grant (published in the order of appointment and the findings of fact and conclusions of law required by 755 ILCS 5/11a – 3) and actions that are 1) reasonable, 2) necessary, and 3) benefit the word. It is respectfully suggested that the record herein and in case 07 P 5360 suggest that all the protective criteria were vitiated and ignored. (Judicial notice of this Court’s records and case 07 P 5360 is requested in the interest of justice).
The Summary Judgment order entered herein is particularly offensive to not only the origins, and principles, of Equity, but Article 1, Section 12 of the Illinois Constitution, but Amendment 14 of the United States Constitution. A litigant seeking the equitable relief of a foreclosure cannot engage in FINANCIAL ELDER ABUSE or deal inappropriately with senior citizens. Indeed, the grant of Summary Judgment not only ignores statutory prohibitions, but even basic concepts that even lay litigants are aware.
In particular, how is the Byline Bank even before this Court to file a foreclosure action. An examination of the documents filed by the Byline Bank does not include an assignment, quit claim deed, or other evidence of a conveyance of the Security Interest from the original holder of the Mortgage (Plaza Bank) to Byline Bank). Byline Bank may have some relationship with other creditors of Mr. Sallas, but proxy litigation is not appropriate for a court of equity.
Indeed, the Motion for Summary Judgment filed by the Byline Bank/appellee is replete with documents that connote AND emphasize the plaintiff’s ‘lack of doing equity, unclean hands, criminal conduct’ and serious conduct that raises serious concerns. The clear unequivocal violation of 755 ILCS 5/11a – 22), and 720 ILCS 5/17 -56 cannot be ignored or swept under the Rug. Both statutes are remedial and intended to address the very concerns that are raised in these proceedings.
Further, even though the HIMMEL decision is ignored in these FINANCIAL ELDER ABUSE cases the totality of the legislation enacted at both the State and Federal level manifests a demand that the elderly’s 14th Amendment protections not be trampled on by institutions such are noted herein.
The disclosure rules and ordinances enacted both at the Federal and State level that address loans to senior citizens and other vulnerable people are more than words on paper. They are intended to be strictly enforced, even if a Byline Bank, or a Court Appointed Guardian would be embarrassed or lose money. The spectacle created by the calculation of the alleged balance due illustrated the point. As the Guardian (Mr. Golbert) has never been specifically authorized to address any asset of Appellant Dean Sallas (including his marital property interests) serious questions of ultra vires conduct (as well as criminal contempt of court questions) are raised by the February 15, 2018 petition. These questions and the comments made by the Byline Bank in support of its MOTION FOR SUMMARY JUDGMENT suggest some serious conspiratorial action.
On January 25, 2018 the contract that violated 755 ILCS 5/11a – 22 was signed. This contract was attached to the complaint as the first 3 pages of exhibit H. It is respectfully submitted that the claimed balance due to the Byline Bank was approximately $175,000.00. There was no mention of any sundry secret judgments outstanding etc. In fact the Guardian’s February 15, 2018 petition to Judge Boliker similarly made no mention of such a judgment. Protection of Debtors under law require such items to be disclosed when the documents are signed.
Thus, the Byline Bank /Cook County Public Guardian pattern continues unabated in the lower Court. Mr. and Mrs. Sallas are elderly and vulnerable – ergo, being a bit disrespectful, it is the position of the defendant/appellant that the trial court ruled that if remedial legislation designed to protect against FINANCIAL ELDER ABUSE interferes with the whim and caprice of the Byline Bank & Guardian the said legislation not only can be ignored, but the objecting elderly are silenced![4]
Without discovery, the appellant/defendant has not had the ability to make inquiry as to what if any attunements, special dispensations et al may have been facing him in these proceedings. It is apparent now that the appellant pursuant to the provision of 720 ILCS 5/17 – 56, the appellant might have a serious counterclaim against not only the Byline Bank, but others involved in the trial court proceedings. Section 56 may not come with the hype of a RIC0 action, but not only does this remedial legislation connote a legislative intent that the FINANCIAL ELDER ABUSERS face criminal charges, but on the Civil side the award to be assessed is Triple Damages, plus Attorney fees. So serious was the Illinois Legislature that this remedial legislation be readily available, that it also lowered the Standard of Proof to preponderance of the Evidence.
The appellee is not paranoid in suggesting some sort of attornment or special dispensation by Judge Boliker in approving the Guardian obfuscating a criminal action perpetrated against its ward. He cannot understand Judge Boliker and/or Judge Robles did not forward to Law enforcement a referral in this instant case. It is respectfully suggested that the totality of the facts memorialized in the record herein are a cogent example of FINANCIAL ELDER ABUSE barred by Illinois Statutes, and so corrosive to the core values of America that not only must the Summary Judgment be reversed, but a referral to Law enforcement must be made. 18 USCA 4 demands the same.
The demand of the appellant for a referral is not taken lightly. Indeed, it is respectfully submitted that no making such a request would a measure of disrespect by the appellant for himself, but the Justice system. The calculation of loan balances demands the same. No Court can, in my opinion, garner the respect that is demanded to do its job and accept the calculation of a creditor that commences with a initial loan balance on January 25, 2018 and ends two years later after the payment of approximately $20,000 with a new balance of approximately $200,000 more than the initial debt
With all due respect, the Appellant suggests that the concept of EQUAL PROTECTION OF THE LAW as defined by centuries of English and America Equity law cannot tolerate the conduct disclosed by the Byline Bank in this foreclosure suit toward an elderly couple i.e., Dean Sallas and Amelia Sallas. The Summary Judgment of foreclosure and the subsequent orders of Court approving the “sale” of the home of Mr. and Mrs. Sallas must be reversed and rendered for nought.
2.
WHEN A PARTY FILES A MOTION FOR SUMMARY JUDGMENT, THAT PARTY TO SUCEED IN HIS MOTION MUST MEET THE CRITERION OF TAKING THE FACTS IN THE LIGHT MOST FAVORABLE TO THE NON=MOVING PARTY THERE IS NOT A CHANCE IN HELL THAT THE NON-MOVING PARTY CAN PREVAIL.
The Judicial system of the State Court is the ‘escape value’ of society and thus the Court system must not only be held to the standard of “Caesar’s wife” but, in fact be free of bias, favoritism, and even the appearance of corruption. Thus, if a citizen is to be denied his right to a trial on the merits by a ‘short cut’ procedure of Summary Judgment the proof of liability cannot be tinged by obvious exaggerated claims for attorney fees, obvious breaches of fiduciary relationship, misleading petitions such as the February 15, 201
…
[Message clipped] View entire message
| kenneth ditkowsky | 5:33 PM (5 minutes ago) |  | |
| to Atoyota6@yahoo.com, Joanne, Cheryl, Janet, Ed, Key, JANET, Mary, Katherine, Ditkowsky, Chicago, Dean, ABAJournal.com, AP, aclu@aclu.org, ADA, ABA, Cook, wsj.lts@wsj.com, Tribune, USDOJ, Fox, judgenap@foxnews.com, watters@fox.com, Rick, U.S., Jay, executive-editor@nytimes.com, Brian, newseditors@dowjones.com, fraud_aging@aging.senate.gov, Whistleblower, SUNTIMES, Nasga, Aging.Ilsenior, United, gov.goca@illinois.gov, member@email.aarp.org, guardianship@aging.senate.gov, Aging, The, ABA, executive-editor@nytimes.com, newseditors@wsj.com, American, Probate, info@bettergov.org, email@gop.com, Mary, publiccomments@skokie.org, Sam, Ray, attorney_general@atg.state.il.us, FBI, Debra, Legal, Campasano, Ombudsman, CFPB_Ombudsman, Judiciary, Chicagobar, Illinois, ABA, AARP, American, American, Adult, Lisa, Atty, APS, lawsters@googlegroups.com, McKnights, Loyola, Joe, Breitbart, chicago@fbi.gov, Suntimes, CFPB, Crain’s, CONTACT, Citizen, Durbin, Kenneth, Human, Joanne, Diana, Dorothy, The, Mary, CFPB_EEO, eec.cms@illinois.gov, CFPB_FederalRegisterComments, Federal, International, frontdesk@aclu-il.org, International, Law, Harry, Scott, Headline, YoungTiffany, Dean, correspondence_reply@durbin.senate.gov | |||
Mr. Phillips
It is always interesting to see what entities accept a particular e-mail on a particular subject and where the e-mail does not reach the entity to which it is sent.
Indeed, some of the addresses are old, some are copied wrong etc — On Government e-mail addresses I usually go with the flow and send the -e mails to the address that I was given or that pops up on the computer.
Apparently, a nerve has been hit – I was a little more careless than usual on my last e-mail to you – a bunch of what I thought to be dead e=mail addresses actually appear to have received the e-mail.
The last time this happened was just before the Britney Spears case exploded. (That was the guardian case where this young woman was given a plenary guardian even though she negotiated and performed multi=million dollar contracts! Her obvious incompetency was in NOT protesting more vigorously that her 1st, 4th, 5th and 14th Amendment Rights were violated by The California Courts.
Using the criteria of Spears, anyone at random can be Guardianized. Indeed, in your parents situation that is exactly what has happened.
Methinks that the overt violence in our cities across America may be bringing BIG GOVERNMENT to the realization that our Courts are THE EXCEPT VALUE OF OUR SOCIETY and the lesson that they are teaching is that Anarchy is the wave of the future. DEMONIZATION of your enemies (or perceived enemies) is the norm — GRANDMA is no longer is a favored person in the Little Red Riding Hood story – it is the wolf!
The guardian is doing a public service in today’s “world” He according to current narrative – he is eliminating the elderly so as to make more room for the next crop of oldsters. He is also sharing the wealth!! (Especially with the courthouse criminals! – Judge **** has at least one child to support, and a Byline Bank loan her husband was given to pay off!! – Judge ***** Amy and Dean Sallas are old! The Guardian and judge arranging for burial of Amy Sallas are doing a public service!!! That public service may violate both the Federal and the State Constitution – but – what the H*** – those are outdated documents anyhow. The credo is printed on the back of the dollar bill, to wit: IN JUdge **** we trust!!! (God is also old!)
Ken Ditkowsky
…
[Message clipped] View entire message
 | ReplyReply allForward |
JUSTICE 4 EVERY1, NFP 5534 N. Milwaukee Ave JoAnne Denison, Executive Director Chicago, IL 60630 Cell Phone 773-255-7608 ph 312-553-1300 http://www.justice4every1.com fax 773-423-4455 JoAnne@Justice4Every1.com A social Justice Services NFP since 2014
Sacred Heart Roman Catholic Church 2810 5th Avenue, Rock Island, IL. 61201 (309) 794-0660 shrec@sacredheartri.com http://www.sacredheartri.com
March 10, 2023
RE: Knox County Case No. 22 PR 12 and 21 MR 21 –Estate of Fred Stegall SEEKING INFORMATION ON KNOX COUNTY COURT CORRUPTION
Dear Sacred Heart Church
I am the Executive Director of Justice 4 Every1, Not for Profit. I run and manage blogs (www.justice4every1.com and http://www.marygsykes.com) regarding corrupt and abusive guardianships in Chicago and in Illinois and nationwide. There are more than 1600 posts on those blogs about corruption in the courts and horrific abuse of the elderly in Guardianship and then their Estates are looted by attorneys and others in decedent’s estates and these blogs are extremely popular with over 300 hits per day. We are currently seeking information on court corruption in Knox County and in particular in the above case which involves the Fred Stegall Estate. Mr. Stegall unfortunately passed away in January 2022, leaving over 150 acres of farm and timberland, to Tonny and Penny Williamson, two elderly Christian women who cared for Fred Stegall in his final days and spent at least $115,000 to care for him, because his court appointed guardian Curtis Ford and his Guardian ad Litem appointed by Judge Radmussen refused to give Fred Stegall a dime in living expenses for over one year– food, clothing and utilities, despite the fact that Fred Stegall had some $500,000+ in his bank accounts. Instead, over $50,000 went to court appointed lawyers to drain his estate. This, unfortunately is not uncommon in Probate, and in particular, Guardianship cases where the motto is: target, narcotize to guardianize, drain the estate, and when the money runs out, narcotize the elderly person to death and quickly bury the victim to destroy all traces of evidence the person was abused and drugged. Anyone over age 50 can fall a victim to our nation’s thousands of probate courts. It is estimated that at any time, some 1.5 million elderly and disabled persons are locked into expensive guardianship proceedings where Estates are billed at rates from $300 to $400+ per hour, which typically drains the Estate quickly and the victim is typically left penniless and on medicaid and food stamps. In one guardianship case in Cook County, Lorraine Phillips, she was in a guardianship for 5 years and attorneys Franciszkowicz and Martin billed her $4 million estate $1 million in attorney’s fees. The Illinois appellate court apparently thought this was okay, because they never overturned those excessive attorneys fees. In Mr. Stegall’s case, he was left to die in a nursing home and if his friends had not diligently searched and found him, he would have died alone. The Guardian and court appointede Guardian ad Litem (both Illinois licensed attorneys) never told Mr. Stegall’s friends he had been taken by ambulance to a hospital and then a nursing home. All Mr. Stegall’s friends had to figure out where he was and how he had been taken when they abruptly found him missing one day. The Fred Stegall cases have been rocked with controversy and terrible problems. And as a reporter for these blogs I personally have a number of questions: 1. Why is the Diocese of Peoria suing the Williamsons for their dear friend’s farm and timber land? When did churches start suing people to take their land? I personally have been involved with Christian churches for decades and I have never heard of a Christian Church suing an Estate, getting involved in any dispute in an Estate and trying to take farm and timberland from their friends and neighbors. 2. Why did the court and Judge Curtis Lane block all discovery requested by the Williamsons, rush quickly to trial, and why did attorneys Paul Mangieri and John W. Robertson file suit against the Williamsons over this farmland when Fred Stegall made it repeatedly known that he did not want to sue the Williamsons and that James Blake was not his attorney and had never been his attorney? 3. Why did Father Lee Brokaw take the witness stand a few days ago and tell the following lies? a. that Fred attended weekly mass without fail (when Fred did not attend weekly mass all the time, that he depended upon someone driving him since fall of 2020, and b) then his church, Abingdon Church was closed for over a year during Covid, and then c) Brokaw was not even the pastor there, so how would he know?) Father Brokaw was not the priest for Fred Stegall and rarely if ever saw him. All good questions. 4. Why is attorney John Robertson standing in the court hallways and telling witnesses that the Williamsons are “crooks and scam artists?” When in fact these are good, kind Christian ladies who took care of 95 year old Fred Stegall for over a year in his final days and spent over $115,000 on his care when the Guardian ad Litem and Guardian of the Person and court would not give him a dime for living expenses and necessaries? 5. Why did Father Lee Brokaw provide false testimony to the court that the Williamsons prevented him from giving Fred Stegall last rites when in fact they had no control over that. At the time of his death he was in a Guardianship and only his Guardian ad Litem and court appointed Guardian (Curtis Ford and Patrick Egan) who could have done that. The Williamsons actually drove Fred to Catholic Church numerous times when he was too frail to drive himself. But the bigger question is why is the Catholic Church and the Diocese of Peoria getting involved in Estates to try to take land from citizens via contested and expensive probate proceedings. If you have any information on this case and why the proceedings are so very strange and troublesome I would greatly appreciate hearing from you. I am a reporter for two popular blogs on court corruption and you may provide me with statements “off record” and I would keep everything in confidence. (Illinois does in fact have a “reporter’s privilege law”) It’s time to clean up the court system in Illinois, and I and other concerned citizens would greatly appreciate your help in doing so. Remember that the greatest cure for corruption is always sunshine which is a tremendous cure for corruption. If you have any information about this case or Judge Lane or Attorneys Paul Mangieri or John Robertson, I would greatly appreciate your bringing this information to my attention so that justice may be done. You are welcome to call, fax or email me with the information and it will be kept in confidence. If you call me, please email or text me first so I know you are a real person and not a robo call or spammer. And please pray for these dear, kind ladies that justice may be done. Thank you. Sincerely, Joanne Denison Executive Director, Justice 4 Every1, NFP Blogger and dedicated to accountability in the courts
Ms. Clair is formerly of Des Plaines, Illinois. She lived in a trailer park. She was wrongfully evicted from a trailer park there while she was in a nursing home for 2 years. She is currently in the hospital in ICU and is not expected to live throughout the night.
Her attorney has been handling her affairs but is now looking for friends and family who would like to attend Ms. Clair’s funeral and pay their last respects. We know of zero friends and family right now, but we do want to get the word out and give her a nice funeral.
Please contact me at joanne@justice4every1.com if you or someone you know may be interested in attending her funeral. It will be at Concord Funeral Home in Chicago, IL on Cicero avenue most likely next weekend. Light a candle and say a prayer for her. She was homeless, but the homeless deserve friends and love too.
See the full story at:
By Michael Gormleymichael.gormley@newsday.com@GormleyAlbanyUpdated December 13, 2022 10:01 pm
ALBANY — State Attorney General Letitia James on Tuesday sued the Fulton Commons Care Center nursing home in East Meadow, accusing its operators of a “toxic culture of deceit” that used public money to pad the payroll for relatives and a “heinous record of resident abuse.”
The lawsuit also accuses the facility of knowingly underreporting deaths from the COVID-19 virus by as much as 45% while avoiding scrutiny by making robocalls to family members that said the facility “was free from COVID-19.”
The attorney general’s office filed the lawsuit Tuesday to force changes in the operation of the nursing home, but to keep the facility open, a spokeswoman said.
“Fulton Commons failed its residents and denied them the basic right of receiving comfortable, competent, and respectful care at the facility entrusted to serve them,” James said. “Rather than honor their legal duty to ensure the highest possible quality of life for the residents in their care, the Fulton Commons owners cut funding for staffing so they could take more money for their own personal gain. These actions led to a devastating pattern of resident abuse, neglect, and mistreatment.”
The nursing home referred a request for comment to Cathie Doyle, who had been the nursing home administrator. The attorney general’s office said Doyle left the job Nov. 16.
Sign up for the Nassau news this week newsletter
The biggest news, politics and crime stories in Nassau County, in your inbox every Friday at noon.Sign up
By clicking Sign up, you agree to our privacy policy.
The lawsuit accuses the owner, Moshe Kalter, and several relatives and operators of related companies of “a fraudulent scheme that led to insufficient staffing levels, significant resident neglect, mistreatment, and abuse.”
The lawsuit’s accusations of financial fraud include:
Accusations of resident abuse and neglect include:
The subjects of the accusations named in the lawsuit include principal owner Kalter, his wife, Frady Kalter; her brother, Aaron Fogel, and his wife, Esther Fogel. Also named in the lawsuit are the Kalter’s eight adult children: Mindy Steger, Sheindy Saffer, Chana Kanarek, Dovid Kalter, Yitzchok Kalter, Aryeh Kalter, Sheva Treff, and Chaya “Sara” Lieberman; Kalter’s nephew Steven Weiss, Fulton Commons’ comptroller; and Doyle.
The lawsuit seeks to replace the nursing home’s medical director, prohibit admission of more residents until staffing meets appropriate standards, install financial and health care monitors at the owner’s expense, force the owner and others who benefited from the alleged scheme to repay the money, and require them to reimburse the state for cost of the investigation.
Long Islanders whose loved ones were patients at Fulton Commons, both during and prior to the pandemic, recalled a facility that they said was wholly understaffed and failed to provide the most basic care to residents.
“It was a house of horrors for older people,” said Mary McKenna of Bellmore. Her aunt, Eileen Turansky, died at Fulton Commons in 2014 after months of alleged abuse and mistreatment at the facility.
“They failed in every level of responsibility,” said Meri Danenza of East Meadow. She unsuccessfully had tried to get her mother, Edith Kessler, moved out of Fulton Commons early in the COVID-19 pandemic.
Kessler died at Fulton Commons on April 2, 2020, and Danenza said doctors at the facility told the family her mother had COVID-19. “They didn’t call us when she was getting worse,” Danenza said. ” … They didn’t do anything.”
In 2020, family members whose loved ones lived and died at Fulton Commons formed a Facebook group to share their stories. The group has more than 250 members.
Last week, the attorney general’s office announced the indictment of a former licensed practical nurse at the nursing home who was accused of sexual abuse of a resident in 2020 and a former director of nursing was indicted on charges of failing to report the abuse.
With Robert Brodsky and Jim Baumbach
By Michael Gormley
michael.gormley@newsday.com@GormleyAlbany
Michael Gormley has worked for Newsday since 2013, covering state government, politics and issues. He has covered Albany since 2001.
Share on FacebookShare on TwitterEmail this story
I sincerely hope that Letitia James will be able to clean up the nursing home business and get many of these elderly residents back home with in home care.
