Families tread carefully through maze of guardianship
When elderly Virginians can no longer make decisions for themselves, their families — or the state — must step in.
ey williamlee 061416 p01
Bill Lee, 86, in his room at the Virginia Veterans Care Center. Since early 2015, members of his family have been responsible for decisions about his health and fitness.
Posted: Sunday, July 10, 2016 12:00 am
“In the United States, all adults are considered legally capable of making decisions regarding their personal and financial affairs unless a court of law determines otherwise.”
A judge disagrees. And as doctors testified during two days of hearings and through a stack of depositions in two court files, Lee’s brain can no longer process indisputable evidence that runs counter to his beliefs.
Lee dismisses that medical verdict and is appealing the judicial one. He clings to one fact he’s certain is true: This is no way to treat an old man.
Last year, guardians, whether family members or public agencies, directed the lives of 10,356 Virginians. The number of people requiring guardians has increased with each passing year and has risen nearly 50 percent since 2011.
Lee has wealth, though he’s spent more than $100,000 of it on lawyers this year alone, and he has family willing to care for him, though he doesn’t want them to.
Just the opposite can be found a half-hour drive from Lee’s room at the Virginia Veterans Care Center. A handful of elderly patients make their home at Catawba Hospital because they have no place to go, and no money or family to look after their welfare. They need what Lee has but doesn’t want: someone authorized to make decisions for them.
Like Lee, they are no longer capable of managing their own lives. But unlike Lee, they’re paupers, and no one they know is willing to help. So they wait at a psychiatric hospital, long after they are ready for discharge. They’ll stay there until someone dies and frees up a slot in the state’s public guardianship program.
State policymakers say this is no way to treat old people.
Virginia lawmakers agreed in February to spend up to $500,000 to figure out what types of services are needed in the Roanoke and New River valleys so elderly people with dementia and other mental illnesses can live in homes or other community settings rather than at a state psychiatric hospital. Though the study is due in November, the state Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Services has yet to hire a consultant.
“One of the big issues is for folks who can’t make decisions on their own,” said Catawba CEO Walton Mitchell in an interview earlier this year. “There are not enough guardians to go around.”
What is a guardian?
Whether your net worth is counted in a series of skimpy zeroes or seven fat digits, when a brain illness robs you of your capacity to care for yourself and your affairs — even if you think you still can — a judge may decide who’s the guardian of your health and who’s the conservator of your money.
The same person can fill both roles, especially if an estate is simple.
Guardians and conservators aren’t reserved solely for the elderly. Parents file petitions when their children with intellectual or developmental disabilities become adults so that they can continue to communicate with doctors and teachers and to protect their children’s income from swindlers and debtors. Other families seek limited control of loved ones with relapsing serious mental illnesses so they can more easily compel prompt medical intervention.
Before someone is stripped of his right to be the boss of himself, a guardian ad litem looks at how well he or she functions and recommends to a judge how much authority should be placed in another person’s control.
“When someone is demonstrating any level of cognitive impairment, memory loss, whether it’s actually dementia or a brain injury or mental illness, especially within the context of guardianship actions, we are having to balance the needs and rights of the individuals, but we’re really trying to assess what are their abilities and what abilities are compromised,” said Roanoke attorney Rhona Levine, who is president-elect of the Virginia Academy of Elder Law Attorneys.
“The important issue here is that it’s not all or nothing,” she said. “Very often, especially in the frail elderly, it’s going to be complete.”
At times, the Adult Protective Services Division of the Department for Aging and Rehabilitative Services will recommend that people need guardians, mostly because they no longer can safely care for themselves. Last year, the agency substantiated 10,109 reports of negligence, abuse or exploitation; more than half were due to self-neglect.
Professionals who work with the elderly say that, ideally, people would have the foresight when they’re well to execute legal documents expressing how they wish to be treated if stricken with a brain illness, and their families would harmoniously respect those wishes.
Public guardians
Sometimes no family or friends are willing to serve as guardians, and the person who needs help lacks financial resources.
Nearly 20 years ago, Virginia created a public guardian program to serve this need, which continues to grow. Last year, lawmakers added $500,000 to the budget to care for 100 more people, and for the first time the program reached into every corner of Virginia. The program can serve 706 clients; another 884 people were on a waiting list.
When the program began, Family Service of Roanoke Valley was named to run one of three pilot projects.
“It was a brand new concept back in 1997 that an agency would be a guardian rather than a person,” said Cathy Thompson, who oversees Family Service’s guardianship program. She and her staff serve as guardians for 70 people, placing them in group homes, assisted living facilities or nursing homes, and then coordinating health care and services.
“Most of our clients back then were elderly and in nursing homes. That’s not the case today. We have a lot of younger individuals, and they are not necessarily in nursing homes,” she said. The public guardians play a vital role in moving people of all ages out of the state’s training centers in order to comply with a Justice Department order.
“With all guardian clients, we include them as much as possible in making decisions, whether we show them pictures or have a conversation they will forget in 30 minutes, or misconstrue,” she said. They also try to establish a “values history” to figure out what the client was like before he needed a guardian. This is important when it comes to making decisions for someone else.
Thompson said they seek to substitute their judgment so that it mirrors choices the person would have made, rather than to opt for what they might think is in the person’s best interest.
“We strive for the substitute judgment because that’s including the person in as much as possible,” Thompson said. “They’ve not been awarded a guardian for a happy reason. It’s because they’ve been abandoned or mistreated or had a mental illness or kind of walked off the job. So we always have to be mindful of not assuming what the circumstances were because we truly don’t know.”
For tough decisions, especially those involving end of life, Thompson turns to a team of physicians, attorneys and ethicists.
“I’ve never had anybody we had become guardian over who has an advanced directive,” she said. “To do all that, you have to be mentally stable and competent.”
And, she is always on the lookout for a family member or friend to step into the role.
“Family members in the beginning might be fearful of accepting a guardian role because they think they’ll be financially responsible,” she said. They won’t be. Sometimes someone will step forward, she said. “We also have had families say we don’t want anything to do with this person.”
An ‘extreme case’
Bill Lee is hard of hearing, steadies himself with a cane and is quite capable of conversing, though he rambles often through his life story, which started in Floyd County, through his two marriages and lifelong career that began with buying cars at auctions and evolved into owning rental houses.
Doctors have testified that Lee has an uncommon type of dementia that affects the frontal lobe of his brain. Those with this disease often seem lucid and no more forgetful than any 80-something, and score well on cognitive function tests. The disease causes emotional outbursts, delusions, manic behavior, hyper-sexuality and changes in behavior — conditions Lee’s conservators note in court documents.
Lee thinks that any behavioral changes were due to medication, not illness, and that he’s recovered.
Lee also believes he was on top of his business, running it well, when he fell ill in February 2014. Court records indicate otherwise. He had fallen behind in paying real estate taxes and collecting rents, and code violations had been filed on some properties.
As Lee bounced through hospitals and nursing homes for physical and mental illnesses, his family went to court seeking to manage his health and his business. A few years earlier, Lee had executed a power of attorney ceding such authority to two of his five children. One of his daughters bowed out as his guardian, and another stepped into the role. He readily admits he wanted his current conservator to manage his financial affairs because he thought she was a sharp businesswoman.
But he also claims he changed his mind but became ill before he could sign new documents.
As his health improved, the daughter who serves as his guardian moved him from restrictive care and allowed him freedom to spend his days as he chose as long as he returned to the facilities each evening. His conservators, another daughter and her husband, also permitted him to visit his office and his rental property, but they soon asked the court to bar him as he was interfering and undermining their ability to lease properties and make repairs.
Lee looks at all the years he ran the business with office help from only his late wife and worries that too much money is now going to salaries.
In guardian and conservator cases, a judge appoints a guardian ad litem to represent the person whose rights may be diminished. Lee’s guardian ad litem assessed how well he could function and how dysfunctional some of the family dynamics were. In a report to Roanoke County Judge William Broadhurst, she found Lee no longer had the capacity to manage his affairs and that his conservators were competent substitutes; however, she said, Lee would probably respond better to an independent third party.
The judge kept the family members as permanent co-conservators, and Lee has been battling the decision ever since. He said he doesn’t see bank statements, he has no idea whether any of his cars and equipment have been sold and he’s upset with a new court action that seeks to sell one of his warehouses to the city of Salem for $150,000, a price he views as too low.
He is now asking the Supreme Court of Virginia to review his case and permit him to name new conservators. Their attorney advised them not to discuss the case while it’s still on appeal. Lee’s guardian also said she did not want to talk publicly. Lee’s estate pays all the attorneys’ fees.
“His case is so extreme. It has a lot of elements that we see in other cases. But don’t assume that it’s common to have that extreme of those issues,” Levine said. “Not that we don’t ever see them. But it’s not the norm. That’s why so many people are familiar with the case.”
She does not represent anyone involved in Lee’s case. She does serve on Thompson’s board that oversees the local public guardians, and she represents family members seeking to obtain guardianship or to have the court remove one guardian and replace him or her with another.
“Either the agent is believed to be no longer acting in person’s best interest, like all the money is disappearing from their account, or they’ve parked momma someplace where they haven’t been to visit for a few months,” she said. “It does get messy, and it absolutely gets emotional. ... It’s amazing what goes on in families.”
Often squabbles are resolved when family members refocus.
“Most elder law attorneys will tell you, no matter who they are representing in a guardianship, what they are always looking at is the needs of that elder,” Levine said. “So I might have a client who is looking for a little more for themselves than the elder, and I have to represent my client appropriately, but at least I have the opportunity to say, ‘Let’s look at how this affects dad.’”
Maintaining oversight
Guardian and conservator cases aren’t closed until the person dies. Until then, the judge maintains oversight.
To ensure that people aren’t abused or neglected, guardians must file annual reports with their local social service agency. The documents report the incapacitated person’s health, living arrangements, how often the guardian visits, whether the guardian agrees with current treatment and the need for continued guardianship, along with a compensation request.
Though the Department for Aging and Rehabilitative Services keeps statistics on the number of guardian cases, no one at the state level reviews any reports. This is done within each local social service agency. There is no central repository to determine whether guardians filed as required or whether any report raised concerns. Each social service agency is required to file a list of delinquent reports with the local circuit court.
To ensure that a person’s estate isn’t mismanaged or exploited, conservators must obtain a surety bond, file an inventory of assets within four months with the local commissioner of accounts and then each year provide a detailed accounting of every penny received and spent.
Lee’s conservators file with Furman Whitescarver Jr., who has served as commissioner of accounts for Roanoke County and Salem since 1977. He was appointed by the court after the death of his father, who himself had reviewed every estate since 1925.
Whitescarver handles oversight for about 700 estates each year; most are reviews of accounts for people who have died, while a few are for people like Lee.
“Sometimes they run down to no money coming in other than Social Security, and the person is in the nursing home, so we get them to be the designated payee, zero out the estate and there is no more conservator,” he said. “Otherwise, as long as there is money or other assets to be looked after, they need to file with me.”
Whitescarver said Lee has visited his office, but he’s asked him to leave since his only involvement in the case is to ensure the conservators file a complete accounting of the estate. In every case, he requests bank records and information documenting each transaction — for example, a deposit for rent needs to specify for which property.
Once he is satisfied, Whitescarver said, he files a report with the circuit court.
Lee’s estate is more complex than most. “It takes a long time for us to audit something like this,” he said. “They do have a CPA helping them, but these things drag out.”
Whitescarver said he rarely finds irregularities.
“On several occasions I’ve been concerned about how the money’s handled and have the commonwealth’s attorney in there when I go to see the judge. Thank goodness it’s rare,” he said. Usually, “they’ve not mishandled the money, but mishandled the paperwork and have a hard time proving it. All the sudden something easy becomes a nightmare.”
Protecting the vulnerable
Lee is upset that he’s been stripped of his rights to manage his business and view his monthly statements.
“I need to see my banking accounts. They’re keeping all the records from me,” he said. “What I’m trying to prove to you is I need to get out of here and get this stuff taken care of before I lose everything.”
Lee’s physical possessions are reduced to what fits inside his bedroom at the Virginia Veterans Care Center: clothes, boxes of legal documents and a flip phone to call everyone and anyone who might help him. He longs to touch his belongings and regain control of his life.
“When dealing with guardianship, it’s good for everyone to remember the overview is to protect people, not to settle inter-family disputes, even though we end up having to do that a lot,” Levine said. “The focus is on protecting our compromised elders or special needs population — even if they don’t think they need it.”
Lee certainly doesn’t think he needs it. Though his battle is extreme, elements of his case crop up in others.
“My first guardianship was contested. After the family was appointed, they said, ‘How do we get her to the nursing home?’ I said, ‘You take her.’ They said she wouldn’t go,” Levine recalled. “I said, ‘This gives you power and authority. It does not cause her to magically deport to the facility.’”
Guardians still need to figure out how to persuade their wards to agree to the level of care they’d choose, if they were well enough to decide on their own.
— National Association for Court Management, "Adult Guardianship Guide"
This story is about the otherwise.
Bill Lee, a World War II veteran, “worked like a donkey” his entire life. By the time he collapsed alone in his Roanoke County house in 2014, Lee owned $5 million worth of rental homes; vacant lots crammed with cars, trucks and construction equipment; and warehouses stuffed with a lifetime of deal making.
Now at 86, Lee is forbidden by law to step onto any of his properties, including the home he lived in for nearly 50 years, unless his family permits him to do so. Lee signed a legal document several years ago expressing his desire for his family to manage his affairs. Now he thinks they are mismanaging his holdings.A judge disagrees. And as doctors testified during two days of hearings and through a stack of depositions in two court files, Lee’s brain can no longer process indisputable evidence that runs counter to his beliefs.
Lee dismisses that medical verdict and is appealing the judicial one. He clings to one fact he’s certain is true: This is no way to treat an old man.
Last year, guardians, whether family members or public agencies, directed the lives of 10,356 Virginians. The number of people requiring guardians has increased with each passing year and has risen nearly 50 percent since 2011.
Lee has wealth, though he’s spent more than $100,000 of it on lawyers this year alone, and he has family willing to care for him, though he doesn’t want them to.
Just the opposite can be found a half-hour drive from Lee’s room at the Virginia Veterans Care Center. A handful of elderly patients make their home at Catawba Hospital because they have no place to go, and no money or family to look after their welfare. They need what Lee has but doesn’t want: someone authorized to make decisions for them.
Like Lee, they are no longer capable of managing their own lives. But unlike Lee, they’re paupers, and no one they know is willing to help. So they wait at a psychiatric hospital, long after they are ready for discharge. They’ll stay there until someone dies and frees up a slot in the state’s public guardianship program.
State policymakers say this is no way to treat old people.
Virginia lawmakers agreed in February to spend up to $500,000 to figure out what types of services are needed in the Roanoke and New River valleys so elderly people with dementia and other mental illnesses can live in homes or other community settings rather than at a state psychiatric hospital. Though the study is due in November, the state Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Services has yet to hire a consultant.
“One of the big issues is for folks who can’t make decisions on their own,” said Catawba CEO Walton Mitchell in an interview earlier this year. “There are not enough guardians to go around.”
What is a guardian?
Whether your net worth is counted in a series of skimpy zeroes or seven fat digits, when a brain illness robs you of your capacity to care for yourself and your affairs — even if you think you still can — a judge may decide who’s the guardian of your health and who’s the conservator of your money.
The same person can fill both roles, especially if an estate is simple.
Guardians and conservators aren’t reserved solely for the elderly. Parents file petitions when their children with intellectual or developmental disabilities become adults so that they can continue to communicate with doctors and teachers and to protect their children’s income from swindlers and debtors. Other families seek limited control of loved ones with relapsing serious mental illnesses so they can more easily compel prompt medical intervention.
Before someone is stripped of his right to be the boss of himself, a guardian ad litem looks at how well he or she functions and recommends to a judge how much authority should be placed in another person’s control.
“When someone is demonstrating any level of cognitive impairment, memory loss, whether it’s actually dementia or a brain injury or mental illness, especially within the context of guardianship actions, we are having to balance the needs and rights of the individuals, but we’re really trying to assess what are their abilities and what abilities are compromised,” said Roanoke attorney Rhona Levine, who is president-elect of the Virginia Academy of Elder Law Attorneys.
“The important issue here is that it’s not all or nothing,” she said. “Very often, especially in the frail elderly, it’s going to be complete.”
At times, the Adult Protective Services Division of the Department for Aging and Rehabilitative Services will recommend that people need guardians, mostly because they no longer can safely care for themselves. Last year, the agency substantiated 10,109 reports of negligence, abuse or exploitation; more than half were due to self-neglect.
Professionals who work with the elderly say that, ideally, people would have the foresight when they’re well to execute legal documents expressing how they wish to be treated if stricken with a brain illness, and their families would harmoniously respect those wishes.
Public guardians
Sometimes no family or friends are willing to serve as guardians, and the person who needs help lacks financial resources.
Nearly 20 years ago, Virginia created a public guardian program to serve this need, which continues to grow. Last year, lawmakers added $500,000 to the budget to care for 100 more people, and for the first time the program reached into every corner of Virginia. The program can serve 706 clients; another 884 people were on a waiting list.
When the program began, Family Service of Roanoke Valley was named to run one of three pilot projects.
“It was a brand new concept back in 1997 that an agency would be a guardian rather than a person,” said Cathy Thompson, who oversees Family Service’s guardianship program. She and her staff serve as guardians for 70 people, placing them in group homes, assisted living facilities or nursing homes, and then coordinating health care and services.
“Most of our clients back then were elderly and in nursing homes. That’s not the case today. We have a lot of younger individuals, and they are not necessarily in nursing homes,” she said. The public guardians play a vital role in moving people of all ages out of the state’s training centers in order to comply with a Justice Department order.
“With all guardian clients, we include them as much as possible in making decisions, whether we show them pictures or have a conversation they will forget in 30 minutes, or misconstrue,” she said. They also try to establish a “values history” to figure out what the client was like before he needed a guardian. This is important when it comes to making decisions for someone else.
Thompson said they seek to substitute their judgment so that it mirrors choices the person would have made, rather than to opt for what they might think is in the person’s best interest.
“We strive for the substitute judgment because that’s including the person in as much as possible,” Thompson said. “They’ve not been awarded a guardian for a happy reason. It’s because they’ve been abandoned or mistreated or had a mental illness or kind of walked off the job. So we always have to be mindful of not assuming what the circumstances were because we truly don’t know.”
For tough decisions, especially those involving end of life, Thompson turns to a team of physicians, attorneys and ethicists.
“I’ve never had anybody we had become guardian over who has an advanced directive,” she said. “To do all that, you have to be mentally stable and competent.”
And, she is always on the lookout for a family member or friend to step into the role.
“Family members in the beginning might be fearful of accepting a guardian role because they think they’ll be financially responsible,” she said. They won’t be. Sometimes someone will step forward, she said. “We also have had families say we don’t want anything to do with this person.”
An ‘extreme case’
Bill Lee is hard of hearing, steadies himself with a cane and is quite capable of conversing, though he rambles often through his life story, which started in Floyd County, through his two marriages and lifelong career that began with buying cars at auctions and evolved into owning rental houses.
Doctors have testified that Lee has an uncommon type of dementia that affects the frontal lobe of his brain. Those with this disease often seem lucid and no more forgetful than any 80-something, and score well on cognitive function tests. The disease causes emotional outbursts, delusions, manic behavior, hyper-sexuality and changes in behavior — conditions Lee’s conservators note in court documents.
Lee thinks that any behavioral changes were due to medication, not illness, and that he’s recovered.
Lee also believes he was on top of his business, running it well, when he fell ill in February 2014. Court records indicate otherwise. He had fallen behind in paying real estate taxes and collecting rents, and code violations had been filed on some properties.
As Lee bounced through hospitals and nursing homes for physical and mental illnesses, his family went to court seeking to manage his health and his business. A few years earlier, Lee had executed a power of attorney ceding such authority to two of his five children. One of his daughters bowed out as his guardian, and another stepped into the role. He readily admits he wanted his current conservator to manage his financial affairs because he thought she was a sharp businesswoman.
But he also claims he changed his mind but became ill before he could sign new documents.
As his health improved, the daughter who serves as his guardian moved him from restrictive care and allowed him freedom to spend his days as he chose as long as he returned to the facilities each evening. His conservators, another daughter and her husband, also permitted him to visit his office and his rental property, but they soon asked the court to bar him as he was interfering and undermining their ability to lease properties and make repairs.
Lee looks at all the years he ran the business with office help from only his late wife and worries that too much money is now going to salaries.
In guardian and conservator cases, a judge appoints a guardian ad litem to represent the person whose rights may be diminished. Lee’s guardian ad litem assessed how well he could function and how dysfunctional some of the family dynamics were. In a report to Roanoke County Judge William Broadhurst, she found Lee no longer had the capacity to manage his affairs and that his conservators were competent substitutes; however, she said, Lee would probably respond better to an independent third party.
The judge kept the family members as permanent co-conservators, and Lee has been battling the decision ever since. He said he doesn’t see bank statements, he has no idea whether any of his cars and equipment have been sold and he’s upset with a new court action that seeks to sell one of his warehouses to the city of Salem for $150,000, a price he views as too low.
He is now asking the Supreme Court of Virginia to review his case and permit him to name new conservators. Their attorney advised them not to discuss the case while it’s still on appeal. Lee’s guardian also said she did not want to talk publicly. Lee’s estate pays all the attorneys’ fees.
“His case is so extreme. It has a lot of elements that we see in other cases. But don’t assume that it’s common to have that extreme of those issues,” Levine said. “Not that we don’t ever see them. But it’s not the norm. That’s why so many people are familiar with the case.”
She does not represent anyone involved in Lee’s case. She does serve on Thompson’s board that oversees the local public guardians, and she represents family members seeking to obtain guardianship or to have the court remove one guardian and replace him or her with another.
“Either the agent is believed to be no longer acting in person’s best interest, like all the money is disappearing from their account, or they’ve parked momma someplace where they haven’t been to visit for a few months,” she said. “It does get messy, and it absolutely gets emotional. ... It’s amazing what goes on in families.”
Often squabbles are resolved when family members refocus.
“Most elder law attorneys will tell you, no matter who they are representing in a guardianship, what they are always looking at is the needs of that elder,” Levine said. “So I might have a client who is looking for a little more for themselves than the elder, and I have to represent my client appropriately, but at least I have the opportunity to say, ‘Let’s look at how this affects dad.’”
Maintaining oversight
Guardian and conservator cases aren’t closed until the person dies. Until then, the judge maintains oversight.
To ensure that people aren’t abused or neglected, guardians must file annual reports with their local social service agency. The documents report the incapacitated person’s health, living arrangements, how often the guardian visits, whether the guardian agrees with current treatment and the need for continued guardianship, along with a compensation request.
Though the Department for Aging and Rehabilitative Services keeps statistics on the number of guardian cases, no one at the state level reviews any reports. This is done within each local social service agency. There is no central repository to determine whether guardians filed as required or whether any report raised concerns. Each social service agency is required to file a list of delinquent reports with the local circuit court.
To ensure that a person’s estate isn’t mismanaged or exploited, conservators must obtain a surety bond, file an inventory of assets within four months with the local commissioner of accounts and then each year provide a detailed accounting of every penny received and spent.
Lee’s conservators file with Furman Whitescarver Jr., who has served as commissioner of accounts for Roanoke County and Salem since 1977. He was appointed by the court after the death of his father, who himself had reviewed every estate since 1925.
Whitescarver handles oversight for about 700 estates each year; most are reviews of accounts for people who have died, while a few are for people like Lee.
“Sometimes they run down to no money coming in other than Social Security, and the person is in the nursing home, so we get them to be the designated payee, zero out the estate and there is no more conservator,” he said. “Otherwise, as long as there is money or other assets to be looked after, they need to file with me.”
Whitescarver said Lee has visited his office, but he’s asked him to leave since his only involvement in the case is to ensure the conservators file a complete accounting of the estate. In every case, he requests bank records and information documenting each transaction — for example, a deposit for rent needs to specify for which property.
Once he is satisfied, Whitescarver said, he files a report with the circuit court.
Lee’s estate is more complex than most. “It takes a long time for us to audit something like this,” he said. “They do have a CPA helping them, but these things drag out.”
Whitescarver said he rarely finds irregularities.
“On several occasions I’ve been concerned about how the money’s handled and have the commonwealth’s attorney in there when I go to see the judge. Thank goodness it’s rare,” he said. Usually, “they’ve not mishandled the money, but mishandled the paperwork and have a hard time proving it. All the sudden something easy becomes a nightmare.”
Protecting the vulnerable
Lee is upset that he’s been stripped of his rights to manage his business and view his monthly statements.
“I need to see my banking accounts. They’re keeping all the records from me,” he said. “What I’m trying to prove to you is I need to get out of here and get this stuff taken care of before I lose everything.”
Lee’s physical possessions are reduced to what fits inside his bedroom at the Virginia Veterans Care Center: clothes, boxes of legal documents and a flip phone to call everyone and anyone who might help him. He longs to touch his belongings and regain control of his life.
“When dealing with guardianship, it’s good for everyone to remember the overview is to protect people, not to settle inter-family disputes, even though we end up having to do that a lot,” Levine said. “The focus is on protecting our compromised elders or special needs population — even if they don’t think they need it.”
Lee certainly doesn’t think he needs it. Though his battle is extreme, elements of his case crop up in others.
“My first guardianship was contested. After the family was appointed, they said, ‘How do we get her to the nursing home?’ I said, ‘You take her.’ They said she wouldn’t go,” Levine recalled. “I said, ‘This gives you power and authority. It does not cause her to magically deport to the facility.’”
Guardians still need to figure out how to persuade their wards to agree to the level of care they’d choose, if they were well enough to decide on their own.
More about Bill Lee
More about Cathy Thompson
- ARTICLE: Navigating the maze of guardianship
- ARTICLE: Adults Plus Counseling earns award for support of seniors
Posted: Sunday, July 10, 2016 12:00 am
“In the United States, all adults are considered legally capable of making decisions regarding their personal and financial affairs unless a court of law determines otherwise.”
A judge disagrees. And as doctors testified during two days of hearings and through a stack of depositions in two court files, Lee’s brain can no longer process indisputable evidence that runs counter to his beliefs.
Lee dismisses that medical verdict and is appealing the judicial one. He clings to one fact he’s certain is true: This is no way to treat an old man.
Last year, guardians, whether family members or public agencies, directed the lives of 10,356 Virginians. The number of people requiring guardians has increased with each passing year and has risen nearly 50 percent since 2011.
Lee has wealth, though he’s spent more than $100,000 of it on lawyers this year alone, and he has family willing to care for him, though he doesn’t want them to.
Just the opposite can be found a half-hour drive from Lee’s room at the Virginia Veterans Care Center. A handful of elderly patients make their home at Catawba Hospital because they have no place to go, and no money or family to look after their welfare. They need what Lee has but doesn’t want: someone authorized to make decisions for them.
Like Lee, they are no longer capable of managing their own lives. But unlike Lee, they’re paupers, and no one they know is willing to help. So they wait at a psychiatric hospital, long after they are ready for discharge. They’ll stay there until someone dies and frees up a slot in the state’s public guardianship program.
State policymakers say this is no way to treat old people.
Virginia lawmakers agreed in February to spend up to $500,000 to figure out what types of services are needed in the Roanoke and New River valleys so elderly people with dementia and other mental illnesses can live in homes or other community settings rather than at a state psychiatric hospital. Though the study is due in November, the state Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Services has yet to hire a consultant.
“One of the big issues is for folks who can’t make decisions on their own,” said Catawba CEO Walton Mitchell in an interview earlier this year. “There are not enough guardians to go around.”
What is a guardian?
Whether your net worth is counted in a series of skimpy zeroes or seven fat digits, when a brain illness robs you of your capacity to care for yourself and your affairs — even if you think you still can — a judge may decide who’s the guardian of your health and who’s the conservator of your money.
The same person can fill both roles, especially if an estate is simple.
Guardians and conservators aren’t reserved solely for the elderly. Parents file petitions when their children with intellectual or developmental disabilities become adults so that they can continue to communicate with doctors and teachers and to protect their children’s income from swindlers and debtors. Other families seek limited control of loved ones with relapsing serious mental illnesses so they can more easily compel prompt medical intervention.
Before someone is stripped of his right to be the boss of himself, a guardian ad litem looks at how well he or she functions and recommends to a judge how much authority should be placed in another person’s control.
“When someone is demonstrating any level of cognitive impairment, memory loss, whether it’s actually dementia or a brain injury or mental illness, especially within the context of guardianship actions, we are having to balance the needs and rights of the individuals, but we’re really trying to assess what are their abilities and what abilities are compromised,” said Roanoke attorney Rhona Levine, who is president-elect of the Virginia Academy of Elder Law Attorneys.
“The important issue here is that it’s not all or nothing,” she said. “Very often, especially in the frail elderly, it’s going to be complete.”
At times, the Adult Protective Services Division of the Department for Aging and Rehabilitative Services will recommend that people need guardians, mostly because they no longer can safely care for themselves. Last year, the agency substantiated 10,109 reports of negligence, abuse or exploitation; more than half were due to self-neglect.
Professionals who work with the elderly say that, ideally, people would have the foresight when they’re well to execute legal documents expressing how they wish to be treated if stricken with a brain illness, and their families would harmoniously respect those wishes.
Public guardians
Sometimes no family or friends are willing to serve as guardians, and the person who needs help lacks financial resources.
Nearly 20 years ago, Virginia created a public guardian program to serve this need, which continues to grow. Last year, lawmakers added $500,000 to the budget to care for 100 more people, and for the first time the program reached into every corner of Virginia. The program can serve 706 clients; another 884 people were on a waiting list.
When the program began, Family Service of Roanoke Valley was named to run one of three pilot projects.
“It was a brand new concept back in 1997 that an agency would be a guardian rather than a person,” said Cathy Thompson, who oversees Family Service’s guardianship program. She and her staff serve as guardians for 70 people, placing them in group homes, assisted living facilities or nursing homes, and then coordinating health care and services.
“Most of our clients back then were elderly and in nursing homes. That’s not the case today. We have a lot of younger individuals, and they are not necessarily in nursing homes,” she said. The public guardians play a vital role in moving people of all ages out of the state’s training centers in order to comply with a Justice Department order.
“With all guardian clients, we include them as much as possible in making decisions, whether we show them pictures or have a conversation they will forget in 30 minutes, or misconstrue,” she said. They also try to establish a “values history” to figure out what the client was like before he needed a guardian. This is important when it comes to making decisions for someone else.
Thompson said they seek to substitute their judgment so that it mirrors choices the person would have made, rather than to opt for what they might think is in the person’s best interest.
“We strive for the substitute judgment because that’s including the person in as much as possible,” Thompson said. “They’ve not been awarded a guardian for a happy reason. It’s because they’ve been abandoned or mistreated or had a mental illness or kind of walked off the job. So we always have to be mindful of not assuming what the circumstances were because we truly don’t know.”
For tough decisions, especially those involving end of life, Thompson turns to a team of physicians, attorneys and ethicists.
“I’ve never had anybody we had become guardian over who has an advanced directive,” she said. “To do all that, you have to be mentally stable and competent.”
And, she is always on the lookout for a family member or friend to step into the role.
“Family members in the beginning might be fearful of accepting a guardian role because they think they’ll be financially responsible,” she said. They won’t be. Sometimes someone will step forward, she said. “We also have had families say we don’t want anything to do with this person.”
An ‘extreme case’
Bill Lee is hard of hearing, steadies himself with a cane and is quite capable of conversing, though he rambles often through his life story, which started in Floyd County, through his two marriages and lifelong career that began with buying cars at auctions and evolved into owning rental houses.
Doctors have testified that Lee has an uncommon type of dementia that affects the frontal lobe of his brain. Those with this disease often seem lucid and no more forgetful than any 80-something, and score well on cognitive function tests. The disease causes emotional outbursts, delusions, manic behavior, hyper-sexuality and changes in behavior — conditions Lee’s conservators note in court documents.
Lee thinks that any behavioral changes were due to medication, not illness, and that he’s recovered.
Lee also believes he was on top of his business, running it well, when he fell ill in February 2014. Court records indicate otherwise. He had fallen behind in paying real estate taxes and collecting rents, and code violations had been filed on some properties.
As Lee bounced through hospitals and nursing homes for physical and mental illnesses, his family went to court seeking to manage his health and his business. A few years earlier, Lee had executed a power of attorney ceding such authority to two of his five children. One of his daughters bowed out as his guardian, and another stepped into the role. He readily admits he wanted his current conservator to manage his financial affairs because he thought she was a sharp businesswoman.
But he also claims he changed his mind but became ill before he could sign new documents.
As his health improved, the daughter who serves as his guardian moved him from restrictive care and allowed him freedom to spend his days as he chose as long as he returned to the facilities each evening. His conservators, another daughter and her husband, also permitted him to visit his office and his rental property, but they soon asked the court to bar him as he was interfering and undermining their ability to lease properties and make repairs.
Lee looks at all the years he ran the business with office help from only his late wife and worries that too much money is now going to salaries.
In guardian and conservator cases, a judge appoints a guardian ad litem to represent the person whose rights may be diminished. Lee’s guardian ad litem assessed how well he could function and how dysfunctional some of the family dynamics were. In a report to Roanoke County Judge William Broadhurst, she found Lee no longer had the capacity to manage his affairs and that his conservators were competent substitutes; however, she said, Lee would probably respond better to an independent third party.
The judge kept the family members as permanent co-conservators, and Lee has been battling the decision ever since. He said he doesn’t see bank statements, he has no idea whether any of his cars and equipment have been sold and he’s upset with a new court action that seeks to sell one of his warehouses to the city of Salem for $150,000, a price he views as too low.
He is now asking the Supreme Court of Virginia to review his case and permit him to name new conservators. Their attorney advised them not to discuss the case while it’s still on appeal. Lee’s guardian also said she did not want to talk publicly. Lee’s estate pays all the attorneys’ fees.
“His case is so extreme. It has a lot of elements that we see in other cases. But don’t assume that it’s common to have that extreme of those issues,” Levine said. “Not that we don’t ever see them. But it’s not the norm. That’s why so many people are familiar with the case.”
She does not represent anyone involved in Lee’s case. She does serve on Thompson’s board that oversees the local public guardians, and she represents family members seeking to obtain guardianship or to have the court remove one guardian and replace him or her with another.
“Either the agent is believed to be no longer acting in person’s best interest, like all the money is disappearing from their account, or they’ve parked momma someplace where they haven’t been to visit for a few months,” she said. “It does get messy, and it absolutely gets emotional. ... It’s amazing what goes on in families.”
Often squabbles are resolved when family members refocus.
“Most elder law attorneys will tell you, no matter who they are representing in a guardianship, what they are always looking at is the needs of that elder,” Levine said. “So I might have a client who is looking for a little more for themselves than the elder, and I have to represent my client appropriately, but at least I have the opportunity to say, ‘Let’s look at how this affects dad.’”
Maintaining oversight
Guardian and conservator cases aren’t closed until the person dies. Until then, the judge maintains oversight.
To ensure that people aren’t abused or neglected, guardians must file annual reports with their local social service agency. The documents report the incapacitated person’s health, living arrangements, how often the guardian visits, whether the guardian agrees with current treatment and the need for continued guardianship, along with a compensation request.
Though the Department for Aging and Rehabilitative Services keeps statistics on the number of guardian cases, no one at the state level reviews any reports. This is done within each local social service agency. There is no central repository to determine whether guardians filed as required or whether any report raised concerns. Each social service agency is required to file a list of delinquent reports with the local circuit court.
To ensure that a person’s estate isn’t mismanaged or exploited, conservators must obtain a surety bond, file an inventory of assets within four months with the local commissioner of accounts and then each year provide a detailed accounting of every penny received and spent.
Lee’s conservators file with Furman Whitescarver Jr., who has served as commissioner of accounts for Roanoke County and Salem since 1977. He was appointed by the court after the death of his father, who himself had reviewed every estate since 1925.
Whitescarver handles oversight for about 700 estates each year; most are reviews of accounts for people who have died, while a few are for people like Lee.
“Sometimes they run down to no money coming in other than Social Security, and the person is in the nursing home, so we get them to be the designated payee, zero out the estate and there is no more conservator,” he said. “Otherwise, as long as there is money or other assets to be looked after, they need to file with me.”
Whitescarver said Lee has visited his office, but he’s asked him to leave since his only involvement in the case is to ensure the conservators file a complete accounting of the estate. In every case, he requests bank records and information documenting each transaction — for example, a deposit for rent needs to specify for which property.
Once he is satisfied, Whitescarver said, he files a report with the circuit court.
Lee’s estate is more complex than most. “It takes a long time for us to audit something like this,” he said. “They do have a CPA helping them, but these things drag out.”
Whitescarver said he rarely finds irregularities.
“On several occasions I’ve been concerned about how the money’s handled and have the commonwealth’s attorney in there when I go to see the judge. Thank goodness it’s rare,” he said. Usually, “they’ve not mishandled the money, but mishandled the paperwork and have a hard time proving it. All the sudden something easy becomes a nightmare.”
Protecting the vulnerable
Lee is upset that he’s been stripped of his rights to manage his business and view his monthly statements.
“I need to see my banking accounts. They’re keeping all the records from me,” he said. “What I’m trying to prove to you is I need to get out of here and get this stuff taken care of before I lose everything.”
Lee’s physical possessions are reduced to what fits inside his bedroom at the Virginia Veterans Care Center: clothes, boxes of legal documents and a flip phone to call everyone and anyone who might help him. He longs to touch his belongings and regain control of his life.
“When dealing with guardianship, it’s good for everyone to remember the overview is to protect people, not to settle inter-family disputes, even though we end up having to do that a lot,” Levine said. “The focus is on protecting our compromised elders or special needs population — even if they don’t think they need it.”
Lee certainly doesn’t think he needs it. Though his battle is extreme, elements of his case crop up in others.
“My first guardianship was contested. After the family was appointed, they said, ‘How do we get her to the nursing home?’ I said, ‘You take her.’ They said she wouldn’t go,” Levine recalled. “I said, ‘This gives you power and authority. It does not cause her to magically deport to the facility.’”
Guardians still need to figure out how to persuade their wards to agree to the level of care they’d choose, if they were well enough to decide on their own.
— National Association for Court Management, "Adult Guardianship Guide"
This story is about the otherwise.
Bill Lee, a World War II veteran, “worked like a donkey” his entire life. By the time he collapsed alone in his Roanoke County house in 2014, Lee owned $5 million worth of rental homes; vacant lots crammed with cars, trucks and construction equipment; and warehouses stuffed with a lifetime of deal making.
Now at 86, Lee is forbidden by law to step onto any of his properties, including the home he lived in for nearly 50 years, unless his family permits him to do so. Lee signed a legal document several years ago expressing his desire for his family to manage his affairs. Now he thinks they are mismanaging his holdings.A judge disagrees. And as doctors testified during two days of hearings and through a stack of depositions in two court files, Lee’s brain can no longer process indisputable evidence that runs counter to his beliefs.
Lee dismisses that medical verdict and is appealing the judicial one. He clings to one fact he’s certain is true: This is no way to treat an old man.
Last year, guardians, whether family members or public agencies, directed the lives of 10,356 Virginians. The number of people requiring guardians has increased with each passing year and has risen nearly 50 percent since 2011.
Lee has wealth, though he’s spent more than $100,000 of it on lawyers this year alone, and he has family willing to care for him, though he doesn’t want them to.
Just the opposite can be found a half-hour drive from Lee’s room at the Virginia Veterans Care Center. A handful of elderly patients make their home at Catawba Hospital because they have no place to go, and no money or family to look after their welfare. They need what Lee has but doesn’t want: someone authorized to make decisions for them.
Like Lee, they are no longer capable of managing their own lives. But unlike Lee, they’re paupers, and no one they know is willing to help. So they wait at a psychiatric hospital, long after they are ready for discharge. They’ll stay there until someone dies and frees up a slot in the state’s public guardianship program.
State policymakers say this is no way to treat old people.
Virginia lawmakers agreed in February to spend up to $500,000 to figure out what types of services are needed in the Roanoke and New River valleys so elderly people with dementia and other mental illnesses can live in homes or other community settings rather than at a state psychiatric hospital. Though the study is due in November, the state Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Services has yet to hire a consultant.
“One of the big issues is for folks who can’t make decisions on their own,” said Catawba CEO Walton Mitchell in an interview earlier this year. “There are not enough guardians to go around.”
What is a guardian?
Whether your net worth is counted in a series of skimpy zeroes or seven fat digits, when a brain illness robs you of your capacity to care for yourself and your affairs — even if you think you still can — a judge may decide who’s the guardian of your health and who’s the conservator of your money.
The same person can fill both roles, especially if an estate is simple.
Guardians and conservators aren’t reserved solely for the elderly. Parents file petitions when their children with intellectual or developmental disabilities become adults so that they can continue to communicate with doctors and teachers and to protect their children’s income from swindlers and debtors. Other families seek limited control of loved ones with relapsing serious mental illnesses so they can more easily compel prompt medical intervention.
Before someone is stripped of his right to be the boss of himself, a guardian ad litem looks at how well he or she functions and recommends to a judge how much authority should be placed in another person’s control.
“When someone is demonstrating any level of cognitive impairment, memory loss, whether it’s actually dementia or a brain injury or mental illness, especially within the context of guardianship actions, we are having to balance the needs and rights of the individuals, but we’re really trying to assess what are their abilities and what abilities are compromised,” said Roanoke attorney Rhona Levine, who is president-elect of the Virginia Academy of Elder Law Attorneys.
“The important issue here is that it’s not all or nothing,” she said. “Very often, especially in the frail elderly, it’s going to be complete.”
At times, the Adult Protective Services Division of the Department for Aging and Rehabilitative Services will recommend that people need guardians, mostly because they no longer can safely care for themselves. Last year, the agency substantiated 10,109 reports of negligence, abuse or exploitation; more than half were due to self-neglect.
Professionals who work with the elderly say that, ideally, people would have the foresight when they’re well to execute legal documents expressing how they wish to be treated if stricken with a brain illness, and their families would harmoniously respect those wishes.
Public guardians
Sometimes no family or friends are willing to serve as guardians, and the person who needs help lacks financial resources.
Nearly 20 years ago, Virginia created a public guardian program to serve this need, which continues to grow. Last year, lawmakers added $500,000 to the budget to care for 100 more people, and for the first time the program reached into every corner of Virginia. The program can serve 706 clients; another 884 people were on a waiting list.
When the program began, Family Service of Roanoke Valley was named to run one of three pilot projects.
“It was a brand new concept back in 1997 that an agency would be a guardian rather than a person,” said Cathy Thompson, who oversees Family Service’s guardianship program. She and her staff serve as guardians for 70 people, placing them in group homes, assisted living facilities or nursing homes, and then coordinating health care and services.
“Most of our clients back then were elderly and in nursing homes. That’s not the case today. We have a lot of younger individuals, and they are not necessarily in nursing homes,” she said. The public guardians play a vital role in moving people of all ages out of the state’s training centers in order to comply with a Justice Department order.
“With all guardian clients, we include them as much as possible in making decisions, whether we show them pictures or have a conversation they will forget in 30 minutes, or misconstrue,” she said. They also try to establish a “values history” to figure out what the client was like before he needed a guardian. This is important when it comes to making decisions for someone else.
Thompson said they seek to substitute their judgment so that it mirrors choices the person would have made, rather than to opt for what they might think is in the person’s best interest.
“We strive for the substitute judgment because that’s including the person in as much as possible,” Thompson said. “They’ve not been awarded a guardian for a happy reason. It’s because they’ve been abandoned or mistreated or had a mental illness or kind of walked off the job. So we always have to be mindful of not assuming what the circumstances were because we truly don’t know.”
For tough decisions, especially those involving end of life, Thompson turns to a team of physicians, attorneys and ethicists.
“I’ve never had anybody we had become guardian over who has an advanced directive,” she said. “To do all that, you have to be mentally stable and competent.”
And, she is always on the lookout for a family member or friend to step into the role.
“Family members in the beginning might be fearful of accepting a guardian role because they think they’ll be financially responsible,” she said. They won’t be. Sometimes someone will step forward, she said. “We also have had families say we don’t want anything to do with this person.”
An ‘extreme case’
Bill Lee is hard of hearing, steadies himself with a cane and is quite capable of conversing, though he rambles often through his life story, which started in Floyd County, through his two marriages and lifelong career that began with buying cars at auctions and evolved into owning rental houses.
Doctors have testified that Lee has an uncommon type of dementia that affects the frontal lobe of his brain. Those with this disease often seem lucid and no more forgetful than any 80-something, and score well on cognitive function tests. The disease causes emotional outbursts, delusions, manic behavior, hyper-sexuality and changes in behavior — conditions Lee’s conservators note in court documents.
Lee thinks that any behavioral changes were due to medication, not illness, and that he’s recovered.
Lee also believes he was on top of his business, running it well, when he fell ill in February 2014. Court records indicate otherwise. He had fallen behind in paying real estate taxes and collecting rents, and code violations had been filed on some properties.
As Lee bounced through hospitals and nursing homes for physical and mental illnesses, his family went to court seeking to manage his health and his business. A few years earlier, Lee had executed a power of attorney ceding such authority to two of his five children. One of his daughters bowed out as his guardian, and another stepped into the role. He readily admits he wanted his current conservator to manage his financial affairs because he thought she was a sharp businesswoman.
But he also claims he changed his mind but became ill before he could sign new documents.
As his health improved, the daughter who serves as his guardian moved him from restrictive care and allowed him freedom to spend his days as he chose as long as he returned to the facilities each evening. His conservators, another daughter and her husband, also permitted him to visit his office and his rental property, but they soon asked the court to bar him as he was interfering and undermining their ability to lease properties and make repairs.
Lee looks at all the years he ran the business with office help from only his late wife and worries that too much money is now going to salaries.
In guardian and conservator cases, a judge appoints a guardian ad litem to represent the person whose rights may be diminished. Lee’s guardian ad litem assessed how well he could function and how dysfunctional some of the family dynamics were. In a report to Roanoke County Judge William Broadhurst, she found Lee no longer had the capacity to manage his affairs and that his conservators were competent substitutes; however, she said, Lee would probably respond better to an independent third party.
The judge kept the family members as permanent co-conservators, and Lee has been battling the decision ever since. He said he doesn’t see bank statements, he has no idea whether any of his cars and equipment have been sold and he’s upset with a new court action that seeks to sell one of his warehouses to the city of Salem for $150,000, a price he views as too low.
He is now asking the Supreme Court of Virginia to review his case and permit him to name new conservators. Their attorney advised them not to discuss the case while it’s still on appeal. Lee’s guardian also said she did not want to talk publicly. Lee’s estate pays all the attorneys’ fees.
“His case is so extreme. It has a lot of elements that we see in other cases. But don’t assume that it’s common to have that extreme of those issues,” Levine said. “Not that we don’t ever see them. But it’s not the norm. That’s why so many people are familiar with the case.”
She does not represent anyone involved in Lee’s case. She does serve on Thompson’s board that oversees the local public guardians, and she represents family members seeking to obtain guardianship or to have the court remove one guardian and replace him or her with another.
“Either the agent is believed to be no longer acting in person’s best interest, like all the money is disappearing from their account, or they’ve parked momma someplace where they haven’t been to visit for a few months,” she said. “It does get messy, and it absolutely gets emotional. ... It’s amazing what goes on in families.”
Often squabbles are resolved when family members refocus.
“Most elder law attorneys will tell you, no matter who they are representing in a guardianship, what they are always looking at is the needs of that elder,” Levine said. “So I might have a client who is looking for a little more for themselves than the elder, and I have to represent my client appropriately, but at least I have the opportunity to say, ‘Let’s look at how this affects dad.’”
Maintaining oversight
Guardian and conservator cases aren’t closed until the person dies. Until then, the judge maintains oversight.
To ensure that people aren’t abused or neglected, guardians must file annual reports with their local social service agency. The documents report the incapacitated person’s health, living arrangements, how often the guardian visits, whether the guardian agrees with current treatment and the need for continued guardianship, along with a compensation request.
Though the Department for Aging and Rehabilitative Services keeps statistics on the number of guardian cases, no one at the state level reviews any reports. This is done within each local social service agency. There is no central repository to determine whether guardians filed as required or whether any report raised concerns. Each social service agency is required to file a list of delinquent reports with the local circuit court.
To ensure that a person’s estate isn’t mismanaged or exploited, conservators must obtain a surety bond, file an inventory of assets within four months with the local commissioner of accounts and then each year provide a detailed accounting of every penny received and spent.
Lee’s conservators file with Furman Whitescarver Jr., who has served as commissioner of accounts for Roanoke County and Salem since 1977. He was appointed by the court after the death of his father, who himself had reviewed every estate since 1925.
Whitescarver handles oversight for about 700 estates each year; most are reviews of accounts for people who have died, while a few are for people like Lee.
“Sometimes they run down to no money coming in other than Social Security, and the person is in the nursing home, so we get them to be the designated payee, zero out the estate and there is no more conservator,” he said. “Otherwise, as long as there is money or other assets to be looked after, they need to file with me.”
Whitescarver said Lee has visited his office, but he’s asked him to leave since his only involvement in the case is to ensure the conservators file a complete accounting of the estate. In every case, he requests bank records and information documenting each transaction — for example, a deposit for rent needs to specify for which property.
Once he is satisfied, Whitescarver said, he files a report with the circuit court.
Lee’s estate is more complex than most. “It takes a long time for us to audit something like this,” he said. “They do have a CPA helping them, but these things drag out.”
Whitescarver said he rarely finds irregularities.
“On several occasions I’ve been concerned about how the money’s handled and have the commonwealth’s attorney in there when I go to see the judge. Thank goodness it’s rare,” he said. Usually, “they’ve not mishandled the money, but mishandled the paperwork and have a hard time proving it. All the sudden something easy becomes a nightmare.”
Protecting the vulnerable
Lee is upset that he’s been stripped of his rights to manage his business and view his monthly statements.
“I need to see my banking accounts. They’re keeping all the records from me,” he said. “What I’m trying to prove to you is I need to get out of here and get this stuff taken care of before I lose everything.”
Lee’s physical possessions are reduced to what fits inside his bedroom at the Virginia Veterans Care Center: clothes, boxes of legal documents and a flip phone to call everyone and anyone who might help him. He longs to touch his belongings and regain control of his life.
“When dealing with guardianship, it’s good for everyone to remember the overview is to protect people, not to settle inter-family disputes, even though we end up having to do that a lot,” Levine said. “The focus is on protecting our compromised elders or special needs population — even if they don’t think they need it.”
Lee certainly doesn’t think he needs it. Though his battle is extreme, elements of his case crop up in others.
“My first guardianship was contested. After the family was appointed, they said, ‘How do we get her to the nursing home?’ I said, ‘You take her.’ They said she wouldn’t go,” Levine recalled. “I said, ‘This gives you power and authority. It does not cause her to magically deport to the facility.’”
Guardians still need to figure out how to persuade their wards to agree to the level of care they’d choose, if they were well enough to decide on their own.
More about Bill Lee
- ARTICLE: Navigating the maze of guardianship
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