Woman Found Locked Away Had Fallen Through System

Were it not for one of the wildest Los Angeles gunfights since the West was won, Georgia Mayo might still be trapped in a room with no windows, an open bucket for a toilet and a padlock securing the door.

The rundown Pasadena house in which she was kept belongs to Valerie Nicolescu-Matasareanu, former operator of a home for the disabled and the mother of one of the robbers killed in the North Hollywood bank shooting in February.

Searching for clues on the slain gunman, police found what social services regulators had missed: a mentally ill woman in the custody of someone whose license to run a board-and-care home was suspended after more than a decade of complaints.

Nicolescu-Matasareanu, 54, has pleaded not guilty to felony charges of dependent abuse and false imprisonment as well as a misdemeanor charge of operating an unlicensed care facility.

Authorities have since learned that Nicolescu-Matasareanu had also been receiving Social Security checks for a woman whose whereabouts are unknown. As Pasadena police conduct a missing persons search for that woman, federal authorities say they have begun an investigation into possible Social Security fraud by Nicolescu-Matasareanu.

State records and interviews with local, state and federal officials regarding the Nicolescu-Matasareanu case reveal serious flaws and breakdowns in the system for caring for the mentally disabled and elderly.

Her case surfaced during a widespread law enforcement investigation after a spectacular event that shocked the nation. But the regulators who oversee board-and-care homes say it is likely that others like Mayo are suffering silently in substandard and even squalid conditions, with little chance of being found.

Like the police officers in the North Hollywood shootout, social services officials say they are outgunned.

“We go from fire to fire,” said Elizabeth Sandoval, a staff counsel for the Community Care Licensing division of the state Department of Social Services. “Sometimes people fall through the cracks.”

The cracks in the system, according to social workers and regulators, are the result of staffing shortages and meager budgets at the public agencies overseeing the conditions of those living in board-and-care homes.

Furthermore, control over the homes and their residents is split between different levels of government, among agencies that often fail to communicate with one another.

“There are too many agencies here. There is a mishmash between these agencies, and the board-and-care operators are dodging everyone,” said Dan Napolski, the federal agent in charge of the western region of the inspector general for Social Security.

Nicolescu-Matasareanu was licensed by the state to operate a six-bed Altadena board-and-care home called Valerie’s Villa in 1982. Her license was suspended in July 1996 after repeated citations by state officials, including a 1988 citation for leaving firearms strewn about the house.

Her six clients, according to state records, were eventually moved to other facilities.

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But Georgia Mayo, 44, was not among the six relocated by officials, though Mayo’s sister told police she had lived in Valerie’s Villa for several years. State licensing officials had no record of Mayo when they suspended Nicolescu-Matasareanu’s license.

Regulators now suspect that Nicolescu-Matasareanu took Mayo into Valerie’s Villa without informing them and moved her to the Pasadena house after her license was suspended.

Although state officials were unaware of Mayo’s residence in Valerie’s Villa, the Social Security Administration had been sending Mayo’s disability checks to Nicolescu-Matasareanu for more than a decade, according to federal sources.

People who are eligible for benefits but unable to care for themselves often have designated payees such as relatives or the operators of the board-and-care homes that house them, Napolski said. But the Social Security agency is not responsible for checking a person’s living conditions.

“The federal government and Social Security has no role to play in overseeing the operation of these facilities,” Napolski said, “yet the representative payee and owner-operator of the board-and-care facility are often one.”

Lack of communication among agencies is common, said Doug Harvey, a senior investigator for the community care licensing division of the state Department of Social Services, which investigates licensed board-and-care operators for violations.

According to Harvey, the Social Security Administration is often slow to respond to his department’s requests for payment information.

Social Security officials complain that state regulators do not inform them when a facility loses its license despite a federal law requiring them to do so. Such information, Social Security officials said, would allow them to terminate a board-and-care operator as a payee.

Inspection of facilities can also prove problematic. On several occasions, state licensing officials visited Valerie’s Villa but were denied entry to the home, records show. In September 1995, community care licensing inspectors were turned away twice.

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On one visit, Nicolescu-Matasareanu told inspectors she would not meet with them and drove off in a van with another woman, according to the records. On another visit, a man claiming to be Nicolescu-Matasareanu’s attorney told the inspectors to leave the site and said he would get a gun from his car if they did not do so.

Ardith Javan, who heads the Los Angeles County district attorney’s elder abuse division, said that state inspectors seldom seek inspection warrants to compel operators to let them into homes. Javan said inspectors are reluctant to get the warrants because local police departments often do not want to be bothered with such searches.

In this case, she said, a search could have made all the difference. “If they had gotten a warrant, maybe they would have found Mayo,” Javan said.

Like the failed bank robbery that brought about Mayo’s discovery, the chain of events that led to the suspension of Nicolescu-Matasareanu’s license began with a disturbing situation in another location.

Nicolescu-Matasareanu had taken two of her clients along when she took her sick mother to Huntington Memorial Hospital in Pasadena in September 1995. Nicolescu-Matasareanu left the clients at Huntington when she accompanied her mother to another hospital.

The two mentally ill clients were left alone in the hospital from that afternoon until nearly midnight, when hospital workers turned them over to a social services organization. They had missed their scheduled medications and were seen asking people in the lobby to buy them snacks from the vending machines because they had not eaten.

The two clients were immediately removed from the home. State regulators, who began the process of revoking Nicolescu-Matasareanu’s license, said in interviews and reports that they believed those were the last of the Villa’s clients.

But in October 1995, a Los Angeles County fire captain who went to Valerie’s Villa to conduct an annual inspection reported that a neighbor said the facility was still operating. Nicolescu-Matasareanu refused to allow fire inspectors into the home, and that incident was later cited as the reason for suspending her license.

However, the Fire Department did not make its report to the state until July 1996, and records show that no state officials looked into whether any disabled people were still living at the house.

Nicolescu-Matasareanu is now awaiting trial in the Mayo case, and Pasadena police are pushing ahead with their search for the missing woman, Elena Pietrzik.

Pietrzik’s name did not surface when officials checked California death records. A 1989 state inspection report identifies Pietrzik as an employee at Valerie’s Villa.

Nicolescu-Matasareanu’s lawyer, Mark Geragos, dismissed the Mayo case as “nothing more than an overblown misdemeanor,” and said “a mother is going on trial for the sins of her son.”

Geragos called Nicolescu-Matasareanu an “altruist,” saying she took in Mayo after others had turned their back on the mentally disabled woman.

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As for Pietrzik, Geragos suggests that she is not a missing person. He said in an interview that she is an adult who could come and go of her own free will.

Meanwhile, Mayo is receiving supervised care for her schizophrenia.

The foul conditions that Mayo were found living in represent the daily reality in many delinquent board-and-care homes throughout Los Angeles County, according to Hilda Weintraub, a prosecutor with the district attorney’s elder abuse division.

Weintraub said that relatives of those in board-and-care homes must check the condition of the homes regularly and vigilantly. The only thing remarkable about this case, she said, was the way it surfaced, through the death of Nicolescu-Matasareanu’s bank robber son, Emil. “This wasn’t the worst case,” she said. “We wouldn’t get any publicity without Emil.”