TS Radio: Janet OBrien on elder exploitation in Washington state

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Judges, lawyers use guardianships to prey on elderly

Reprinted with Permission

Barbara Hollingsworth

Local Opinion Editor

The Washington Examiner

Think your well-tended nest egg will protect you from the depredations of old age? Don’t count on it.

Little has changed since the D.C. Court of Appeals ruled almost a decade ago that Probate Judge Kaye Christian abused her power by ordering retired economist Mollie Orshansky, creator of the federal poverty line, removed from her sister’s care in New York and placed in a District guardianship against her will.

Even multimillionaires cannot prevent a judge from appointing a total stranger to take complete control of their affairs — and banish family members who object.

That’s what happened to five-term D.C. Council member Hilda Mason and her husband, Charles, a Harvard graduate who traced his lineage back to the Plymouth landing. Despite Charles’ $22.5 million fortune, this power couple ended their lives in squalor.

Blind, wheelchair-bound and suffering from diabetes and skin cancer, Charles spent his last days in dirty clothing and worn-out shoes, with fingernails so long they curled around his fingers.

“He looked like a hobo,” one witness told The Washington Examiner. His frail wife suffered a broken collarbone when one of her “caregivers” ran her over with a four-wheel-drive vehicle.

At the time of Hilda Mason’s death in 2007, debris and broken furniture littered every room of the couple’s once-stately Shepherd Park home. The roof leaked and the house was infested with rodents and insects.

As attorneys helped themselves to the couple’s assets, Episcopal Senior Ministries reported that “there appears to be no individual or group that is currently responsible for the cleaning/condition of the house.”

According to a Jan. 9, 2001, court transcript, a clearly competent Charles Mason testified before the same Judge Christian that he no longer wanted the Virginia attorney he had previously hired to represent him.

Less than three months later, Charles was declared incompetent after an adverse reaction to a psychotropic cocktail landed him in Suburban Hospital’s psychiatric ward.

Jonell Grace: Guardianship Abuse

Marti Oakley

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The ongoing theft of estates from vulnerable elderly and disabled individuals has been largely ignored by those in the District of Criminals, and by local and state governments.  What has to be the largest transfer of wealth by theft, is accomplished with immoral attorneys and probate judges rigging the system in favor of the predatory guardian.

In what is clearly a case of state to state racketeering, probate judges, payrolling attorneys and predatory guardians have stolen millions upon millions by way of so-called emergency petitions for guardianship implemented for no other reason than to allow these crooks to access the victims assets.

While politicians at all levels are fully aware of the ongoing theft committed in every state, and the unexplained sudden deaths as estates are wiped out and assets moved to into private accounts by the predators, not one of them has stepped up to stop this from happening.  According to many of these politicans, things like this take time to change.  It could be years before they could fix the system.

My question is this: Why?   So much evidence has been compiled in verified court documents and with continual annual reports from the GAO spanning eleven years to confirm the problem is not greedy family members in most cases.  It is the predatory guardians along with attorneys and judges who are perpetrating these crimes against the elderly.

The video’s below are a testament to one woman’s refusal to be bullied, threatened and harrassed by those who run the system.  Jonell Grace is that woman.

TS Radio: Guardianship abuse, A personal experience

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