TN Couple Reportedly Exploited Elderly Residents

Two Jonesborough residents, one named as the caregiver of two elderly people, were arrested Thursday on exploitation charges after they alledgedly wrote checks without permission from both victims’ bank accounts to themselves and withdrew large amounts of money daily from local ATMs, according to a restraining order filed in court.

After a four-month Johnson City police investigation with assistance from Tennessee Adult Protective Services and the 1st Judicial District Attorney General’s Office, Jama Curtis, 39, and Tony Curtis, 40, both of Jonesborough, were indicted by a Washington County grand jury, a police news release said.

Jama Curtis was acting as the caregiver of a non-married couple, Ben A. Roberts, 85, and Billie Godwin, 82, according to Assistant District Attorney General Erin McArdle.

Jama Curtis was power of attorney for Roberts on July 13, 2012, to assist him and provide for his medical care and well-being, as he had been diagnosed with dementia.

According to McArdle, who filed the restraining order against the Curtises, from Sept. 20 to Nov. 9, Jama Curtis started withdrawing up to $1,000 daily from ATM machines in both Jonesborough and Johnson City from Roberts’ account. The total amount she withdrew is estimated at $47,014.

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Jonesborough Couple Reportedly Exploited Elderly Residents

Alleged Fraudster Charged With Bilking the Elderly

A 62-year-old man accused of bilking several people out of more than $70,000 with stories ranging from his wife’s miscarriage to a legally entangled inheritance pleaded not guilty to 13 felonies.
Prosecutors say James Keeton gained the trust of the victims, ages 51 to 88, before gaining their money. He met them through the San Mateo Horseman’s Association and St. Pius Parish in Redwood City ultimately sought personal loans between $3,000 and $23,650. He reportedly claimed his wife had recently miscarried twins and their home was at risk of foreclosure but that that they could repay the money with a pending large inheritance tied up in litigation in New York. Keeton took the loans but never repaid the money, according to the District Attorney’s Office.

The total amount taken from all the alleged victims is $73,650.

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Alleged Fraudster Charged With Bilking the Elderly

Disbarred Attorney Will Serve One Year in Prison for Stealing Nearly $900,000

A disbarred Bedford attorney who stole nearly $900,000 from several people, including an 85-year-old client, will pay restitution to her victims, serve one year in a house of correction, and an additional year-and-a-half under house arrest, prosecutors said today.

Maureen F. Pomeroy, 46, was sentenced in Middlesex Superior Court Monday, after she pleaded guilty March 4 to two counts of larceny from a person over 60, one count of larceny, and one count of embezzlement by fiduciary, Attorney General Martha Coakley said in a statement. Pomeroy was accused of stealing from two clients and one of their sons.

“This defendant took advantage of clients who entrusted her with access to their funds and believed that she would assist them with their best interests in mind. … This defendant is being held accountable for these injustices and is no longer able to practice law,” Coakley said.

Pomeroy will be required to pay $277,292 in restitution to her victims, the statement said.

Coakley’s office said that during the summer of 2008, Pomeroy stole more than $810,000 from an 85-year-old man who had hired her to draft his will, estate planning documents, and assist him with several bank accounts.

Pomeroy embezzled some of that money for personal gain and used the rest to repay two other people whom she had previously misappropriated money from, the statement said.

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Disbarred attorney will serve one year in prison for stealing nearly $900,000

Steubenville Lawyer Will Appeal, Says Client’s ‘Brain Isn’t Fully Developed’

One day after his client, 16-year-old Ma’lik Richmond, was convicted by an Ohio judge of raping an incapacitated girl, attorney Walter Madison said on CNN’s Piers Morgan Live that he plans to appeal the verdict and that Richmond should not have to register as a sex offender for the rest of his life.

“I don’t believe he should have to register as a sex offender until he dies. … I don’t believe that a person, at 75 years old, should have to explain for something they did at 16 when scientific evidence would support your brain isn’t fully developed,” said Madison, “when the evidence in the case would suggest you were under the influence.”

Since briefly making his case last night, many people have been quick to mock Madison. Piers Morgan himself told the lawyer, “I’ve got 3 teenage sons and when you get to 16, 17, your brain’s developed enough to know you shouldn’t be raping girls.”

Morgan’s sons aside, Madison’s brain-development complaints are not so outlandish when one considers that the Supreme Court abolished the death penalty for juvenile offenders in 2005 for a similar reason. After hearing from numerous medical practitioners who stated that young criminals’ mental capacities are not yet matured, the court struck down juvenile executions, stating in its opinion “it would be misguided to equate the failings of a minor with those of an adult, for a greater possibility exists that a minor’s character deficiencies will be reformed.”

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Steubenville Lawyer Will Appeal, Says Client’s ‘Brain Isn’t Fully Developed’

Hollywood Couple Found Guilty of Elderly Exploitation

A former Hollywood stockbroker and her financial-planner husband were convicted on Tuesday of tricking a 94-year-old woman with dementia into signing over her $10 million estate, according to the Broward State Attorney’s Office.

Cynthia Franke, 51, and Tyrone Javellana, 47, were found guilty of financial exploitation of an elderly person after two hours of jury deliberation, prosecutors said.

They were accused of befriending Josephine Troisi and her since-deceased sister Mary Teris and then becoming their financial advisors.

Experts testified Troisi lacked the capacity to make sound decisions when Franke took her to an attorney to change her will and her trust in 2009.

Troisi’s son uncovered the exploitation and investigators found several transfers of between $400 and $32,000 from the sisters to Franke and Javellana, police said.

Franke and Javellana face up to 30 years in prison for the first-degree felony conviction. Their sentencing is scheduled for April 19. Javellana also faces another charge of exploiting Teris, prosecutors said.

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Hollywood Couple Found Guilty of Elderly Exploitation

Woman Charged With Stealing $423K From Elderly Uncle

A woman is in jail after allegedly stealing more than $420,000 from her 96-year-old uncle while he suffered from Alzheimer’s and dementia.

The Pierce County Prosecutor’s Office charged Betsey Cammon, 54, with 34 counts of theft, a crime she initially blamed on threats and extortion from an unknown person.

According to the Prosecutor’s Office, Cammon was given power of attorney for her uncle in 1998. But, that would only go into effect once he was no longer able to make his own decisions regarding his financial affairs.

In May 2007, Cammon was added to her uncle’s bank accounts. He was admitted to a nursing home two years later.

In March 2009, Cammon’s power of attorney was finally activated when a doctor found her uncle could no longer manage his affairs. At that point, Cammon had already withdrawn nearly $200,000 from his bank accounts, according to the Prosecutor’s Office.

Cammon failed to pay her uncle’s nursing home bill in 2010. Rainier Guardianship Services took over guardianship of Cammon’s uncle in May of that year and needed to liquidate his assets to pay his living expenses because his accounts had been almost completed depleted, according to the Prosecutor’s Office.

Cammon’s uncle died four months later, and his nephew was appointed as his personal representative, finding a number of discrepancies in his uncle’s accounts.

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Woman Charged With Stealing $423,000 From Elderly Uncle

LA County Probate Courts Reorganized

Starting next month, new Los Angeles Superior Court probate cases will be filed in one central courthouse, instead of multiple district locations throughout the county.
Currently, there are 10 courthouses that hear probate cases.

On April 8, new cases concerning wills, trusts, estates, guardianships and conservatorships will be filed in Room 429 in the Stanley Mosk Courthouse, 111 N. Hill St. in Los Angeles, according to a news release earlier this month.

For a short time, between April 8 and June 10, district courthouses will continue to hear cases already set for hearing, said Mary Hearn, spokeswoman for the Los Angeles Superior Court. But on June 10 all remaining adjudicated cases will be transferred to the Stanley Mosk Courthouse.

The Antelope Valley Courthouse, in the North District, is the only facility that will not be impacted by change.

There is one accommodation the court plans to make regarding the transferred guardianship and conservatorship cases.

“If there is some overriding hardship that prevents parties in those cases from traveling to the Stanley Mosk Courthouse, the court will consider hearing the case at an outlying location,” Hearn said. “The reason is that conservatorship and guardianship cases frequently involve people with some kind of physical or mental disability that make traveling that distance especially difficult.”

“They can make a motion to the court to have the matter heard in a location closer to where they reside.”

The consolidation is part of an effort to save between $55 million and $85 million in the 2013-14 fiscal year.

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LA County Probate Cases Reorganized

Beware Of Predatory Elder Law And Probate Lawyers

Few would allege that elder law and/or probate attorneys are completely unnecessary but due to causes as simple as greed and as scandalous as often times complete disregard of the Constitution in local and county probate courts, many predatory elder law and probate attorneys have begun unconscionably enriching themselves at the expense of their clients and everyone else involved, however, innocent their involvement. Abuses have become commonplace enough, one should “Beware Of Predatory Elder Law And Probate Lawyers.” A cottage industry of predatory elder law and probate attorneys make their primary incomes “living off the land,” by attaching their fees, which are often out of control, to the estates and assets whenever there is some controversy among families that causes one family member or another to “lawyer up.”

Unfortunately I have twice been victimized in such situations and I am certain that thousands, if not millions, more Americans have had similar experiences. My first experience involved the estate of my second ex-wife’s father. He had intended to give his estate, which included property in Oklahoma with at least one oil well on it, equally to his three children. He had set up a trust, but had appointed the wife of a cousin as the Trustee of the estate. The Trustee was not to be trusted and in addition to rifling through my ex’s father’s safety deposit boxes and emptying his bank accounts using a power of attorney after his death, employed the services of an attorney to keep the family at bay. The ploy was successful but resulted in the attorney selling the property in Oklahoma and using most of the proceeds to pay his own fees, giving a crumb of just $1000 or so to the Trustee.

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Beware Of Predatory Elder Law And Probate Lawyers

Eighth Annual "Terri’s Day"

The Terri Schiavo Life & Hope Network is delighted to announce that Archbishop Charles Chaput, Archbishop of the Diocese of Philadelphia, will celebrate “The National Memorial Mass for Terri’s Day.”

The International Day of Prayer and Remembrance for Terri Schindler Schiavo, and All of Our Vulnerable Brothers and Sisters (“Terri’s Day”) was established in 2007 and is observed each year on or around March 31st, the date of Terri’s death.

The purpose of this day is to foster education, prayer, and activism regarding discrimination against the cognitively disabled, and advocacy for people in situations similar to what Terri and her family faced.

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Archbishop Chaput to Celebrate National Mass for Eighth Anniversary of Terri Schiavo’s Death

Yucaipa woman, 101, battling for home over handwritten deed

YUCAIPA – Lois Risse, 101, stands hunched over in her front yard, attacking weeds and dandelions with a hoe.

Then she bends at the waist, picks up the plants and places them in a cardboard box beside her metal walker. As she progresses west across the yard, she hooks the box with the garden tool and pulls it closer to her, straying farther and farther from her walker.

The only help she allows from her caregiver is emptying the contents of the box into a garbage bin, and bringing her walker over when it is time to go inside – into a house she no longer owns.

Risse, her neighbors and legal representatives say many people have taken advantage of the petite woman with bright blue eyes since the passing of her husband, William Risse, on Sept. 18, 1982.

“It’s hard to believe there are such thieves,” Risse said.

In January 1983, four months after her husband died, Risse sold the couple’s ranch-style home in southeast Yucaipa via a handwritten deed. Cursive writing chronicles the sale: $60,000 for the home and $4,500 for its contents to a family friend, Glenn Neff.

Two years later, in January 1985, another paragraph was added to the deed. It said Neff paid in full with ownership to be recorded upon Risse’s death. It was signed again by Risse and Neff on Jan. 1, 1985, then notarized on March 29, 1985.

Neither party can produce receipts of payment.

“He never paid me a dime,” Risse said Thursday while sitting on a backless chair inside the home.

Neff had been friends with William and Lois Risse since the 1960s. Now 72, he lives nearly 400 miles from Risse in Walker, southeast of Lake Tahoe.

Risse gave him two years to pay off the house, he said in a phone interview.

“When I bought the house from Lois, I would pay her cash,” Neff said. “She kept track of everything. I just sold a piece of property so I could have paid her (in full). I paid her something each month until it was paid off in two years.”

He also said he orally agreed to let Risse remain in the Yucaipa home until her death, as long as she paid the taxes, utilities and insurance.

“I told Lois – and it’s not on paper – but I told Lois she could live in that house as long as she wanted,” Neff said.

On Wednesday night, Neff said he still plans to continue to stick to that statement, even though he broke an agreement written in the deed not to record it until after her death.

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Yucaipa woman, 101, battling for home over handwritten deed