LAS Article on Elder Abuse in the Tribune!

Author:    Francine Brevetti, BUSINESS WRITER
Article ID: 3442731
Date: January 27, 2006
Publication: Oakland Tribune, The (CA)

THE AMERICAN DREAM: a house that's paid for and your family around you.

But sometimes these very elements can shuck you to the curb when you're old and gray.

Bay Area nonprofit organizations are seeing increased evidence of elderly people being financially abused by their own children. Call it an unintended consequence of the housing boom.

The seniors, who spent decades paying off their modest homes, now have accumulated hundreds of thousands of dollars in equity. All too often, that wealth is being raided by the younger generation.

Take the case of a female senior who struggled with her walker into Judge Julie Conger's courtroom in Alameda County Superior Court on a recent Friday to ask for a temporary restraining order against her adult children.

"They have been terrorizing me for 26 years. They broke the locks on my house. I'm afraid to stay there. They stole my clothes. They took the deed to my house. They put their names on my three credit cards. When they did that, Citibank told me to make a police report. Then the police told me to go here," she said, referring to Conger's Elder Protection Court Program.

Conger, who hears cases of elders who require restraining orders against abusers on Fridays, issued a temporary restraining order to the woman that day.

Elder abuse is increasing, and the risk is rising with the preponderance of personal property lying in the hands of the elderly.

More than 200,000 Californians are victims of elder abuseevery year, according to the state attorney general. Each year 500,000 to 5 million elders in the U.S. are victims of some kind of elder abuse, with 40 percent involving some form of financial exploitation, according to the U.S. Senate Special Committee on Aging. Many cases go unreported.

If you think you are being abused financially or if you observe questionable activity toward your loved one, what can you do?

First, take action — don't ignore warning signs such as a disconnected telephone, frequent checks written to cash and missing documents or jewelry. For help, you can call the county Adult Protective Services in your area and/or seek legal assistance.

Adult Protective Services will interview the elder person in question and investigate the claims.

Adult Protective Services gets involved if the senior is not competent, if the caretaker has undue influence or if there has been physical abuse, said Hope Nakamura, directing attorney of the Legal Aid Society of San Mateo County, which provides free legal services to disadvantaged people.

The organization is seeing more senior financial abuse because more people are aging, but also because housing prices are going up, she said.

"There's more equity available to do damage. About half the financial abuse cases we see are generated by family members rather than caretakers or outside people," Nakamura said.

Sometimes it is difficult to persuade seniors to report abuse to Adult Protective Services because they may fear that doing so would force them into a nursing home.

"But reporting to APS does not automatically land them in a nursing home," Nakamura said. "APS will refer them to a nursing home only when they have no capacity at all to take care of themselves. Instead, APS will try to give them support services to keep them in (the) house. APS may issue a restraining order."

According to Hong Chew, a staff attorney at Alameda County's Legal Assistance for Seniors, "APS is always welcomed because they provide social work services and they don't try to get people into trouble. Sometimes the abuser reports to APS because they may be trying to stop another abuser in the family from getting their hands on the estate."

Chew also said that within Alameda County, Adult Protective Services, Legal Assistance for Seniors and the police have an informal network they use to inform each other when an elderly person has been reported as the subject of abuse.

If senior citizens or their relatives want to be legally represented and lack the funds to hire an attorney, they should seek out the legal aid services in their county. "I'm certain that the rising housing prices are a factor in increased financial elder abuse. (They do it by) intimidating, preparing documents and putting them in front of the elderly person, and threatening them until they sign their house over," said Anne Hightower, legal director of Legal Assistance for Seniors in Alameda County. And it only takes a bit of dementia to spin out of control.

Take the case of a family that came to the attention of Alameda County's Legal Assistance for Seniors. Frail, in her 70s and afflicted with dementia, the mother knew something was wrong when her caretaker daughter took her to the bank early in 2004. When her other children visited her — rarely because the caretaker daughter obstructed their visits — they found her frequently bruised and complaining that "something is wrong at the bank."

Finally, one of them contacted Adult Protective Services, which investigated but could not reach any conclusions because of the mother's dementia. The agency did recommend the other children obtain power of attorney.

By the time the other children did so, they found their sister had put her name on her mother's bank account and drained it of almost all the

$230,000 resulting from the recent sale of her home. The house sale was meant to finance her long-term care and to leave the rest for her children. Instead, it financed the caretaker daughter's gambling.