A California man spent $50,000 in legal fees freeing his stepmother from the clutches of a so-called guardian in Las Cruces, New Mexico, who charged $140,000 for services over a year’s time.
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Prosecutors in Pinellas County, Florida, on Nov. 15 charged Traci S. Hudson, guardian and then-president of the Pinellas County Guardianship Association, with felony exploitation of an elderly person. She’s accused of stealing $541,541, via charges of $1,600 per day, from a 92-year-old man she persuaded to assign his power of attorney to her. Within 10 months, she allegedly stashed nearly all of his money in her own accounts. The case prompted a judge to order a review of 31 other cases in which she acted as guardian.
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Last year, April Parks grabbed headlines when she was sentenced to six to 16 years in prison in Nevada for stealing from the elderly — the very people she, as legal guardian, was supposed to protect. “She didn’t see them as people,” said Clark County public guardian Karen Kelly in a Las Vegas Review-Journal article. “They were paychecks.”
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If you live in Colorado take note, and it’s not that Colorado is different than any other state in these matters.
One such case involves a 90-year-old Colorado Springs man who played tennis every day and enjoyed dinner parties regularly with friends until the court intervened and, as his friends tell the Indy, doomed him to an isolated life in a nursing facility from which his friends are barred.
In another, a 79-year-old woman simply disappeared from her home and later called a friend seeking help from an assisted living facility where she’d been admitted by a guardian. She later was moved by the guardian to a facility in another state.
“This system is not here to serve you. It’s here to serve the benefiting attorneys,” says Rick Black of Charlotte, North Carolina. Black formed the nonprofit Center for Estate Administration Reform (CEAR) after a guardianship dispute over this father-in-law, Del Mencarelli, ran up $1.3 million in attorney fees, and Black still lost out to the “predator,” he says.
“All they have to do is put you in a guardianship and rob you blind,” he says. “You’ll never stop them. Guardianship law only helps that.”
Anyone can file a petition for guardianship in Colorado, but many cases come to the courts through Adult Protective Services, a division of the Department of Human Services.
Conservators need not be licensed in Colorado and aren’t vetted by anyone for past criminal activity or financial red flags.
