Join Coz & Marti tonight as they examine the inner workings of advocacy and activism. Guardianship, just as family court issues, the toxic environment of CPS, and other core issues in the public domain is rife with glory hogs, wannabe celebrity’s and other characters whose only real interest is in the promotion of them selves. The result is chaos as self promoters insert themselves into issues where they are neither wanted or needed. Join us as we discuss the effects of this interference in ongoing cases and how this affects the families involved. Learn the difference between those who blithely throw around the word “WE”, and those who actually work with others towards a goal.
You most likely have encountered one of these people. They call your phone incessantly for days on end demanding you communicate with them, because only they can help you. They email you numerous times a day and leave multiple texts on your phone. Why won’t you talk to them? They want all your contacts, especially political connections and the most prized connection of all!~~ MEDIA! Lord how they love the camera! Or to see their name in print.
PS: Yes we know we are going to be attacked for even daring to broach this subject.
Join us Wednesday with our guest Maryann Hastings who will share the story of the murder of her Mom, JoyceAnn Hastings, 87 years old who passed at the careless hands of hospice on December 18, 2018. JoyceAnn was not terminal or dying when she was signed up for hospice.
Maryann had worked as a social worker for years and been in the medical field and knew something was wrong but was still was powerless to save her Mom. Her story is so familiar to all of us who have lost a loved one in the hospice arena. There was no discharge plan, plan of action or vitals taken when JoyceAnn was released from the hospital with high blood pressure to return home. Of course a comfort kit was taken to the house because we all know everyone needs the same medicine regardless of their illness, age or circumstances! It is so wrong and such a heinous crime that is under the radar – until now where we are speaking up and out.
The intent of this show is to warn people of the dangers and the reality of hospice and their term “compassionate care” is a lie in most all cases. It is stealth euthanasia. Our elderly and disabled are being culled because it’s cheaper to euthanize that treat. Who will stand up for our people as they are thrown away like yesterday’s garbage leaving families devastated? No one! So this is why we have to warn others and stand strong together. Do not be a victim to their cruelty of writing your loved one’s last chapter of their life. They deserve to write their own chapter.
You have the right to question doctors decisions, refuse drugs, be a part of “the plan” and/or refuse hospice altogether. Never accept what you are being told without verifying.
If you have a story to share about a loved one taken before their time, contact me at marshajoiner2018@gmail.com . You will need verifiable data.
Luanne Flemming host of “Hidden Truth Revealed” will be co-hosting and will be joined by Phil Ross, attorney for Shelley Thomson. Shelley will also be calling in so that we can hear from her personally.
Shelley Thomson is in a New Braunfels, Texas nursing home (Colonial Manor). She does not belong there and is desperate to be liberated.
Under the guise of guardianship, Texas Health and Human Services Commission took her computer, all her money and assets – and (HHSC) used her disability as an excuse to abduct her, steal her house, her cat, and move her into an abusive nursing home. Her guardian has threatened her with violence. Shelley is held prisoner with no right to leave her room, no visitors, and no exercise.
Shelley Thomson was labeled as incapacitated falsely and maliciously by the state of Texas. State guardianship fraud is a national scandal. Under the guise of protection, states target victims for their money, and treat them worse than prisoners. Shelley’s guardian has threatened her with violence and she has been drugged against her will.
If Shelley cannot pick her own psychiatrist, the court will assign their own, and they will choose the cheapest expert to rubber stamp a denial of capacity once again.
A GoFundMe campaign to raise enough money for Shelley to hire her own psychiatrist, and to help defray expenses of her lawyer who has represented her for over 13 months pro bono. Please click on the link, read the ad and donate. Thanks!
Betrayed by hospice with Marsha Joiner – Wednesday, June 24, 2020
#34 Guest Ron Panzer founder of Hospice Patients Alliance
Typically we discuss hospice issues and the fact that our loved ones are being euthanized daily under the guise of compassionate hospice care. That is still occurring but now; our loved ones are being further taken advantage of with covid19 virus and the callousness of the medical profession!
Ron Panzer brought light to stealth euthanasia when he exposed the truth about what hospice was doing to people under the guise of compassionate care. It was far from compassionate and was premeditated murder with the use of opioids and antianxiety medications which caused terminal sedation until they died a horrible death from starvation and dehydration. He founded Hospice Patients Alliance whose mission is to promote end-of-life care that relieves suffering while allowing a natural death in its own timing and not hastening death.
He has stayed focused on this as well as recently the effects of COVID19 and all of the fictitious data we are hearing every day! Please join us to hear the truth about what is going on with data to support what he is saying and how our loved ones are still being targeted.
Thank you for joining us tonight for this very informative show.
If you have a story to share about a loved one taken before their time, contact me at marshajoiner2018@gmail.com
Friends remembered Wilma Williams as fiercely independent, but a stroke left her in a wheelchair and reliant on hearing aides as large as headphones the day her attorney arrived with a plan to divvy up her $1.7 million estate.
The 93-year-old military widow with no children had nieces and nephews, but Bob Machen personally drafted a will that made himself her primary beneficiary and his son — a man she had never met — a possible heir as well.
Machen said the will represented the wishes of a woman who was like a sister to him and who he helped for years. He claims he watched as she affixed a scribbled signature to the document in a Fairfax County rehabilitation center on July 31, 2018.
Williams died 10 days later, and her relatives said they were stunned to eventually learn that Machen was poised to reap a $1.5 million windfall while they would receive modest bequests. They couldn’t believe the will truly represented Williams’s desires and decided to challenge it in court.
They say the case is a particularly brazen example of the financial exploitation of the elderly, a problem that is rapidly increasing as the senior population grows. The number of people aged 65 and older is projected to double between 2018 and 2060, according to government figures. Various estimates put their losses from fraud between $2.9 billion and a staggering $36.5 billion each year.
Visit her at Medway Manor Nursing Home, in Massachusetts. Messages for her via email at JusticeforMargaret@Mail.com
Justice for Margaret Cook
Margaret Cook is an elderly, disabled Massachusetts woman whose property, civil liberties, life savings, and right to the pursuit of happiness as an American citizen have all been taken away.
She is currently held against her will at Medway Manor nursing home, in Massachusetts, despite an independent psych exam which stated that she was competent enough to live at home, with in-home care, as she has desperately asked. She has been stopped from going to her home, even for a Christmas, Thanksgiving or birthday visit, for a year and a half.
See her video statement if you have access to: vimeo.com/395830770
Imagine if you were removed from your home, told you could never return, and held against your will while your property, and every penny from your bank accounts is taken away.
Imagine that your bills and your taxes are up to date. Imagine that you have had no criminal record in your entire life.
Something like this could only happen in some far away country, a place without respect for human rights and freedoms, right?
You would be wrong. There is a woman named Margaret Cook who would like you to know that this tragedy could happen to anyone. She is in the state of Massachusetts, in the United States. More
We have two guests this evening. Our friends in Australia return to follow up on past broadcasts and the events that have resulted from speaking out.
Mr. D, who reported on the abuses at a nursing home supposedly established to serve those of the Jewish faith, is facing charges for revealing publicly what is transpiring in these gulags for the aged. Mr. D is facing charges for making supposed “anti-semetic remarks” to a man who is Catholic. Mr. D is himself, Jewish. This has all the markings of a concocted excuse to target, intimidate and threaten him. This is so ludicrous that I cannot believe it is actually taking place, but it is.
2nd half
Mia returns to talk about dementia, What are the signs? What can you do? Are dementia-like symptoms the result of psychotropic drugging meant to cause the victim to appear to be suffering from dementia, when actually they are not? We know these deadly drugs are widely used here in the US as chemical restraints, and produce dementia like symptoms. Apparently, Australia has followed suit.
In Minnesota, clearly “protective services” is actually for profit “human trafficking services” for ALL VULNERABLE ADULTS AND CHILDREN! THIS MUST STOP!
Frank Furedi: is an author and social commentator is an emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Kent in Canterbury. Author of How Fear Works: The Culture of Fear in the 21st Century. Follow him on Twitter @Furedibyte
“The scapegoating of the elderly amounts to a form of gerontophobia, which dehumanises the old. Unfortunately, this unflattering representation of the elderly has become normalised to the point that many old people feel culturally isolated and constantly devalued. In my own research of the process of ageing I was struck by the profound sense of alienation and estrangement that many of my elderly respondents communicated to me. In particular they expressed a deep sense of cultural distance from the young.”
In their wisdom, 30 experts – from prestigious universities like Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Cambridge Imperial and UCL – have decided that ageing is no longer a normal feature of life. They want the World Health Organization to classify ageing as a disease. This diseasing of old age represents another blow to the moral status of the elderly.
The experts claim that the transformation of ageing from being a natural part of the cycle of life into a protracted phase of illness will ensure that the medical treatment that the elderly receive will improve. No doubt these medics actually believe that they have the best interest of the elderly at heart. But by rebranding the process of ageing as a form of illness these experts unwittingly contribute to the weakening of the moral status of the old and contribute to the ongoing erosion of the authority of adulthood.
Being old is already considered to be an unattractive and undesirable stage of life. The call to diagnose ageing as a form of illness will merely enhance its negative image.
A $22 million civil RICO case from Cleveland, Ohio has survived another procedural hurdle and appears headed to trial in Cuyahoga county court.
RICO stands for Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization. It was passed by congress and signed into law by President Nixon 50 years ago, in 1970. Originally designed to combat organized crime, the laws’ application has expanded to include any group profiting from an illegal activity.
Macomb County Probate Judge Sandra Harrison ordered the release of Fred Smith, who lives in Bruce Township, but with a stern warning that if he doesn’t account for the missing funds, he will find himself back behind bars.
A Utica man has been confined to the Macomb County Jail for over three weeks and will spend at least two more weeks there for failing to account for millions of dollars spent from his mother’s trust fund that he controlled.
Two former clients of disbarred Hendersonville attorney Andy Allman may finally get their day in civil court after a special judge recently denied a motion to dismiss the cases.
Linda Cela of Clarksville and Erbit Navarro-Teran of Lebanon both filed complaints in Sumner County General Sessions Court against Allman nearly three years ago.
Investigators say Traci Hudson stole more than $500,000 from a man she had guardianship over.
For the latter part of his life, Maurice Myers lived on his own in a small home south of Sarasota.
Then, in March 2017, when he was 92, Myers was hospitalized twice with numerous health complications. He was released to a rehabilitation facility, then moved to a senior care home in Pinellas Park. There, he’d be closer to his daughter, who oversaw his affairs.
The case highlights the unexpected downsides of court-appointed adult guardianships, which are designed to help the old and the infirm manage their lives but are under fire nationwide amid allegations of neglect, abuse and financial exploitation. Those problems haven’t escaped the watchful eye of Congress, as evidenced by the recent introduction of HR 4174 to enact protections against elder abuse and neglect under guardianship.
When families seek judicial intervention, they have no clue of the web of judicial abuse, deception and theft of the family’s assets that will soon ensnare them.
One typical scenario, which compels a family to seek judicial help, is an elderly family member is being held hostage while his/her assets are drained. The family does not foresee that the abuse of the hostage taker is about to be replaced by the abuse by the probate court. The various mechanisms employed by the court are limited only by the ingenuity of the judges, but certain patterns are often seen.
As explained previously Financial Rape: Business as Usual in LA County Probate Court, Judge Lippitt forces the elder person to mediation where the person is subjected to fraud, coercion and exhaustion. All the elder has to do to gain her freedom from the seemingly endless mediation is sign whatever documents the coven of evil shoves in front of her.
As Judge Paul Suzuki explained, all that matters is that she signed the settlement agreement. The Mozer v Augustine supports Judge Suzuki. It does not matter if the elder is comatose during the mediation, all that counts is that somehow the elder’s signature appears. How it got there is irrelevant and no amount of fraud, threats, lies, etc. may ever be introduced into court to show that the elder was financially raped. (Mozer cites: Evid. Code, § 1119 (a)-(c) mediation communications are confidential. “Sign this or never see you son again” – not admissible under Mozer)
As legislation is being passed and proposed in several states, allowing those deemed to be mentally ill or suffering from dementia to be starved to death, we see Australia following suit and targeting their elderly also. Simply arranging for a diagnosis of dementia regardless if it is a legitimate diagnosis, can facilitate the kidnapping, isolation and theft of estates. Now with this handy option available to starve them to death as the estate is being plundered by professional predators, this global harvesting of the elderly for profit is in high gear.
Lawyers along with doctors and government agencies are gaming the system, and are allowed to take over elderly individuals lives and affairs. Protected by probate tribunals and government, massive profits are gained by preying on a vulnerable sector of the population. If in fact, these individuals are compromised, wouldn’t the moral thing to do be to secure their rights and protections? Instead, the governments and their predatory tribunals treat them as if they were nothing and violate even their most basic rights.
For the third year, Del. Mark Levine, D-Alexandria, proposed a bill intended to strengthen family members’ and loved ones’ rights to visit adults who are under legal guardianship. After spending a year working with numerous stakeholder groups to refine the bill into something everyone agreed upon, he was surprised when a lawyer from the Virginia Bar Association stood in opposition during the bill’s subcommittee hearing.
Levine’s first attempt at the bill was inspired by a constituent, Mike Jacobs, who came to Levine with a story about how he had been unfairly banned from seeing his longtime partner, Jane Lopez, who had Alzheimer’s disease, by an attorney serving as Lopez’s legal guardian, Levine said.
Shannon Laymon-Pecoraro, an elder attorney representing the Wills, Estates and Trusts Section of the state bar, objected to several parts of the bill. Among them is a provision that would place greater emphasis on the guardian ad litem determining whether any conflicts of interest exist among the parties in the guardianship case. A guardian ad litem is an attorney appointed by the court to investigate a guardianship case and represent the allegedly incapacitated person’s best interests.
BOSTON − In an emotional speech before the Massachusetts Board of Bar Overseers (BBO), Attorney Lisa Siegel Belanger gave as good as she got. Using her allotted 15 minutes she called out the actions of BBO member Attorney Marsha Kazarosian and the law firm Burns & Levinson for their “fabrication” and exaggeration of charges against her as “retaliation” for her exposure of their “racketeering ring which has preyed on seniors,” including her father, Marvin H. Siegel. The BBO seeks to strip Belanger of her license to practice for two years.
Belanger noted in her speech that despite five years of her filing complaints to the BBO against Attorney Kazarosian, the BBO refused to conduct any investigation against the powerful political figure (and Mass. Gov. Charlie Baker’s high-profile appointee). She also noted that both Kazarosian and BBO Chair Jeffrey R. Martin were absent from the hearing, and that she was again stripped of the opportunity to question her accusers. She pointed out that Martin serves as partner in the firm Burns and Levenson, a firm also at the center of Belanger’s complaint. (Yes, Belanger took on some of the most connected lawyers in Massachusetts.)
With no relief from the courts for years (fighting against those she documented as preying upon seniors), Belanger finally went public. Her case as well as the systemic draining of millions from her now deceased father’s accounts have been chronicled in a series of articles in The Boston Broadside. Belanger noted that while no actions were taken against Kazarosian, and no charges were ever taken against her, everything changed when her family’s plight became public. READ MORE HERE
” I have a warrant out for my arrest because I saved my mother from criminals. The warrant was put out by the same judge and guardian that stole my mother’s freedom and her estate.”
What I am about to share with you is unbelievable, yet it is happening around the world. It is the best kept secret of white collar criminals.
I invite you to view my website below that chronicles my and my mother’s story of horrific abuse by the probate / family courts in the United States, which forced us to flee to Greece for our safety and our lives.
I helped my mother escape a fraudulent guardianship in which a judge forced her to give up all of her rights, forced her into an institution where she was drugged and isolated, and forced her to forfeit her entire estate, including her homes and companies to a corrupt guardian that is unrelated to the family. To conceal their crimes, the predators label their theft of her human and civil rights “in her best interest.” There was nothing wrong with my mother. She was simply wealthy and vulnerable due to age, becoming a widow, and trusting two of her own corrupt children. My mother and I made an extraordinary escape in 2016 and now live in exile in Greece. She is originally from Greece. We are both American and Greek citizens. Had I not taken my mother, she would not be alive today. She lost everything to guardianship; I lost everything to save her.
We left with the clothes on our backs leaving our children, grandchildren, homes and our lives behind. After months of hiding, we arrived in Greece with the help of friends, relatives, complete strangers, and the kindness of a representative at the Greek Embassy who granted us emergency passports for our safety.
“It was once said that the moral test of government is how that government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; and those who are in the shadows of life, the sick, the needy and the handicapped.”
Hubert H. Humphery
Probate Watch is made up of group of people whose lives and loved ones have been impacted by probate court guardianships. We are looking for others to help lobby our legislatures and state organizations to drive change. We need help to show the need for additional legislation to protect our seniors, respect their rights and show how existing laws are being violated.
Please take our guardianship survey:
We are collecting data through an on-line survey to identify areas where there needs to be reform in the guardianship/conservatorship system. The survey is designed to collect statistics supporting the need for reforms and also provide details on how seniors and families have been affected. Your input is valuable to us and we encourage you to participate.
Note: Our survey uses google form documents. Some company IT systems block access to these documents. If you have problems accessing the survey, please try using a different computer or smart phone.
Jaime Hernandez, 66, was recuperating at an Aperion Care facility in Forest Park after getting a kidney transplant at the University of Illinois-Chicago Medical Center a month earlier.
He’d waited seven years to receive a new kidney and all signs were looking good, said his daughter, Maria de Lourdes Gutierrez.
“He was doing really well,” Gutierrez said.
Gutierrez took her dad for a regular appointment with his UIC doctor on Oct. 25, 2018, then brought him back to the nursing home at 8200 Roosevelt Road, where he had been staying for 17 days.
A disturbing aspect of an elder law and trusts and estates practice is the discovery of elder abuse. According to the National Institute on Aging, hundreds of thousands of adults over the age of 60 are abused, neglected, or financially exploited each year. Elder abuse includes physical, emotional, and sexual abuse in addition to neglect and abandonment. The perpetrators are often relatives or friends who have influence over the individual who may be vulnerable due to illness, disability, or age. Sometimes the abuse occurs at the hands of caregivers, whether in the home or in a facility.
New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand has introduced bipartisan legislation to help protect the elderly and infirmed by improving health care worker hiring practices in long-term care and medical facilities. Too often the elderly and infirmed are harmed as a result of the individuals working in the very facilities that are charged with helping rehabilitate them.
The Promote Responsible Oversight and Targeted Employee Background Check Transparency for Seniors Act, also known as “PROTECTS,” is an act that would expand access to the National Practitioner Data Bank for Medicare and Medicaid providers to conduct background checks on employees. Specifically, PROTECTS would include Medicaid/Medicare-certified skilled nursing facilities, home health agencies, hospice programs, and pharmacies.
The Act has been endorsed by the American Health Care Association and the National Association for Home Care & Hospice. The aforesaid Data Bank would reveal malpractice for potential employees and assist facility administrators in their hiring and consequently affect the standards of care.
Facing the glare of the elder-fraud spotlight, Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost (left) is sending his top experts to address the problem in a Steubenville public forum.
Titled “Protecting the Unprotected” the forum will be held from 12:30 pm to 4:00 pm on Wednesday, October 23, 2019 at the Towers Building, 500 Market Street, in the 2nd floor conference room.
Ohio has battled elder-fraud for years, and the state is again in the hot-seat due to a racketeering case brought by Dr. Mehdi Saghafi from Cleveland. A racket is a crime at both state and federal levels and can be spotted when the those billing to “fix” or “manage” a problem are the same people that caused the problem in the first place.
Dr. Saghafi’s claim is that his family was the victim of financial exploitation when his 80-year old wife was trapped in the legal maze of a court-ordered guardianship. The family claims that once “captured” in the court system, attorneys and accountants targeted the family’s assets and billed the family hundreds of thousands of dollars for the ”care” of his wife.
Just months before that racketeering suit was allowed to proceed, there was the FBI investigation of Ohio Judge Diane Vettori-Caraballo (shown left). The judge was indicted and pled guilty to charges stemming from her theft of over $100,000 from an estate for which she was the court-appointed administrator. For more on that story, go here: https://wp.me/p9585T-gD
Ohio is not alone in the fight against fraud. Weeks ago, Michigan’s Attorney General Dana Nessel fired four of her state’s probate administrators after complaints that the attorneys had used their court-power to drain the assets of estates they controlled. See this link for details: https://wp.me/p9585T-fH
Over the summer, Florida’s probate system made national headlines when court-appointed guardian Rebecca Fierle (right) was accused of causing the death of a man who was in her care by issuing a “Do Not Resuscitate” (DNR) order—without informing or getting the consent of the man who was “not to be resuscitated.” For more on this fraud story, go here: https://wp.me/p9585T-gt
Yost’s Steubenville event features nearly a dozen speakers including four with state-wide experience in elder-fraud investigation and prosecution: Sylvia Pla-Raith; Kevin Barbeau, CFE; Michael Kaizar, CPA CFE; Kelly Igoe, JD. The session offers residents of the region a place to meet and learn about the “red flags of fraud” from Ohio’s experts in elder financial fraud.
The Association of Certified Fraud Examiners (ACFE) calls fraud “theft by deceit,” and “theft with a smile and is prosecuted every day across the USA. But in cases where the “mark” or victim is an incapacitated and/or elderly person, the issues can expand from simple fraud into a RICO and civil rights cases.
“Many people don’t know that there are thousands of people in guardianships in Ohio,” says Rosanna Miller (shown right with her father, Clair) who is a member of the advocacy group “Ohio Coalition to End Probate Corruption” (OCEPC). The Ohio coalition is just one of nearly a dozen grass-roots groups across the United States who fight guardianship and elder financial abuse including NASGA, AAAPG and VGPR.
New federal elder-care legislation (U.S. H.R. 4174) details that there are approximately 1.3 million elderly adults in the United States who have their lives controlled in a guardianship. These vulnerable adults have amassed roughly 50 billion dollars in assets. These figures will get bigger with the aging of the “boomer” generation and the rise in life-expectancy.
The Steubenville forum is designed to help people learn how to spot and stop fraud from the best and brightest in the area of elder fraud prevention and prosecution. The speakers will detail the warning signs of elder financial exploitation and financial crimes and give attendees tools and strategies to assist victims of financial exploitation.
In addition to the state-level experts, there will be local Jefferson-County speakers as well, including Sheriff Fred J. Abdalla; Jefferson County Attorney Jane Hanlin; Marie Holt, Ericka Kirkpatrick and probate Judge Joseph Corabi. The forum is designed to give people in the community a local contact when they need expertise in the elder financial fraud area. Q&A sessions are expected, time permitting.
The event is free but the room holds only 125 people. Please use this link to pre-register:
