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