Wards of indicted guardian are missing items, relatives say
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Enlarge Image Request to buy this photoShe’s fighting through Franklin County Probate Court to get them from a Columbus lawyer who was recently indicted and is accused of stealing $41,000 from people he was appointed by the court to protect.
Paul S. Kormanik was supposed to be their guardian. Guardians control nearly every aspect of the lives of people the courts call wards.
Crum’s family is one of at least two accusing Kormanik of stealing belongings, family heirlooms and cash from his wards.
The families became suspicious after they read the five-part Dispatch series “Unguarded,” which detailed a statewide probate system in which a lack of court oversight allows unscrupulous guardians to prey on people they swore to protect. The series is available online here.
Among the worst, according to prosecutors and criminal investigators, was Kormanik.
Franklin County Prosecutor Ron O’Brien said recently that Kormanik chose “to financially exploit Ohio’s vulnerable citizens.”
Kormanik had been responsible for the lives of nearly 400 people in central Ohio. He had amassed those wards through years of court appointments and a series of judges who were looking for easy answers to handle the increasing number of people who needed a guardian to make personal, medical and financial decisions for them.
Kormanik resigned in late August after investigators for Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine and O’Brien began questioning the actions The Dispatch had described. Kormanik cited personal reasons for his resignation.
He was indicted in October on felony theft charges and turned himself in. He later was released on $100,000 bond and could get up to 41/2 years in prison if convicted.
Susan Wasserman, one of Ohio’s two master guardians, was appointed to oversee several of Kormanik’s wards, including Crum’s father, Richard E. Roberts.
Crum said at least 49 items were missing from Roberts’ home. Court documents show that Kormanik paid the family of his paralegal, Julie Whisner, $3,400 to remove Roberts’ belongings so they could be sold at auction. County Probate Judge Robert G. Montgomery, who was in office at the time, approved those fees.
Kormanik, 64, wrote in a November 2013 court filing that he was auctioning off the items because “the personal property is of nominal value. ... There would be no money to pay for long-term storage.”
Records obtained by TheDispatch show that Kormanik has sold about 50 homes belonging to his wards at auction in the past several years. He often paid his son or daughters, or employees of his law practice, with the wards’ money to empty out the houses.
He almost always used the same auctioneer, Mike Brandly, and real-estate agent, Jim Boyd, to list the properties.
The 49 missing items that Crum and Wasserman identified from Roberts’ house were never listed in Brandly’s records or anywhere else in Kormanik’s liquidation of the estate. One of those items, found at Whisner’s home, was a Poulan riding mower.
During a court hearing last week to determine where the items are, Whisner said she took the mower because she had an understanding with Kormanik that she would make an offer to purchase it. She said that a dollar amount was never discussed, however, though her family kept and used the mower for almost a year.
The Whisners later tried to buy the mower from the Roberts family, but the family said no. The Whisners then said they would return the mower only if Roberts’ family paid a $120 delivery fee.
Wasserman sent a check for the delivery fee, but the mower still has not been returned.
As for the other missing items, Joseph Whisner, Julie’s son, said he removed a large leather sofa from the house; he said he recalled it because he needed help carrying the heavy item. He also remembered taking other pieces of furniture from the house, including a love seat, a stone-top table and a tea cart.
None of those items was sold at auction, and none appears on an inventory of items from the home prepared by the auction house. Some of the items can clearly be seen in photos of the property taken by a real-estate agent who listed the home for sale.
Both Joseph Whisner and his mother testified that they took the items from the Roberts’ home to Brandly’s auction house in Groveport. Brandly testified, however, that if anyone says they delivered the items to his warehouse, “they didn’t.”
He said that the inventory-tracking system the business uses would have captured all the items brought to his warehouse from the Roberts estate, even those that never sold, unless they were worthless and discarded as junk.
Kormanik took the witness stand during the hearing. He invoked his constitutional right not to testify against himself and refused to answer questions. He also did not respond to a reporter’s questions after the hearing.
Linda Gomez was at the Roberts hearing last week.
Gomez and her attorney, George E. Georgeff, said several items are missing from the estate of Marcia Pendleton, Gomez’s mother.
“There is a missing gun and some very expensive pieces of furniture that we have pictures of that are now unaccounted for from my mother’s beautiful Bexley home,” Gomez said. “I want to know what happened to them.”
Kormanik filed a motion in Probate Court in June accusing Gomez of taking items, including jewelry, from the house. A court hearing scheduled for November to sort out the details of that case has been delayed until February.
Gomez said she’s also concerned that more than $55,000 that Kormanik was managing for her mother did not show up on financial statements he filed with the court.
“This has been nothing but a nightmare,” said Gomez, who replaced Kormanik as her mother’s guardian in September.
Kormanik’s criminal case is scheduled for a discovery hearing in late February. O’Brien said his investigation of Kormanik continues.
Kormanik’s former wards have since been dispersed to a handful of other guardians. In response to The Dispatch series, DeWine has created and published an Ohio Guardianship Guide for probate courts to hand out to guardians.
State legislators also introduced House Bill 624, which calls for a ward’s bill of rights. The bill also would require probate courts to give guardians DeWine’s handbook. The bill did not make it to a vote in the legislative session that just ended.
State Rep. Dorothy Pelanda, R-Marysville, who co-wrote the bill with Sen. Shannon Jones, R-Springboro, said she has been working with probate judges across the state and plans to reintroduce the bill with clearer requirements of guardians.
“This is something that has to be done to protect Ohio’s most vulnerable residents,” Pelanda said on Wednesday.
lsullivan@dispatch.com
@DispatchSully
jjarman@dispatch.com
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