Elder Abuse Is a Tragedy on the Rise

Three months shy of her 87th birthday, Dorothy Malven spent the final days of her life lying in a Thousand Oaks board-and-care home as a massive bedsore slowly ate a hole in her back.

At 88, Mahlon Lanier died penniless, his hard-earned pension from years behind a supermarket meat counter drained to nothing by a series of caregivers who moved in and cleaned him out.

And then there was Edna Ledford, a frail great-great-grandmother punched in the face in her Ventura home by a street tough who fractured her jaw, and with it a belief that at 94 she was insulated from violent crime.

“They say when you get older, you can’t remember,” Ledford said in an interview before her death last month, recalling in crisp detail the closed-fist punch that put her in the hospital. “I wasn’t expecting it at all.”

Despite tough new laws aimed at protecting the elderly, Ventura County seniors are being beaten and bilked, starved and neglected with startling regularity in crimes that law enforcement officials say are vastly underreported.

Nationwide, only one in 14 incidents of elder abuse come to the attention of law enforcement, mostly because victims are unwilling or unable to turn in their abusers--often their own adult children or spouses.

And many of those who do seek help fall between the cracks of a social welfare system so underfunded and poorly staffed that it is only able to respond to the most severe reports of abuse.

“I am convinced that elders have died as a result of abuse and neglect and the cases just haven’t been discovered,” said Deputy Dist. Atty. Audry Rohn, who helped launch a new unit in her office to prosecute those crimes.

“As a community, we really need to realize this is domestic abuse,” she said. “This is the next step. We’ve done the kids, we’ve done the girlfriends and spouses. Now we are getting to the elders.”

That effort is particularly important because the senior population is growing. In Ventura County, one in every 10 residents is 65 or older, and that number is expected to double over the next two decades.

In addition, Ventura County lags far behind other California counties when it comes to receiving state-funded services designed to help and protect the elderly.

With funding lagging and the elder population mushrooming, social workers and law enforcement officials fear crimes against the elderly could skyrocket.

That is why in recent months they have joined a consortium of senior-service providers dedicated to raising community awareness in hope of heading off violence before it happens.

“We are not prepared to deal with the [cases] we have now, let alone the growth we will see by 2010,” said Shirley Alloway, manager of the county agency that investigates reports of elder abuse. “It’s just scary.”

Praying for Deliverance

Scared is how Mahlon Lanier felt living with a hired caregiver he said starved, slapped and neglected him to the point he prayed death would come before the start of another painful day.

A wheelchair user and partially blind, Lanier needed someone to cook and clean for him. In January 1996, his son placed an ad in the newspaper and hired 35-year-old Victoria Luna.

Although they got along well at first, Lanier told police that over time Luna turned mean. He said she yelled at him, put mattresses on the floor to block his wheelchair and fed him only once a day--usually a cup of coffee and a honeybun. Unable to reach the bathroom, he urinated in bed. He began to feel dehydrated. He worried that Luna was poisoning him.

“I was a prisoner in my own home,” Lanier said during a court hearing last year. “I couldn’t do nothin’. . . . I was just wasting away. And I just--one day I said, ‘Lord, please take me home. I’m ready.’ ”

That was June 2, 1996--six months after Luna moved into his Hastings Avenue home in east Ventura, and a day before Police Officer Jack Richards knocked on his door.

Richards was responding to a prosecutor’s request to check on Lanier because he had been abused by a prior caregiver.

After a brief confrontation with Luna at the front door, Richards said he made his way to the back of the house and found Lanier, pale and undernourished, lying in his own waste in a darkened bedroom with a stench so bad the officer had to step outside to keep from gagging.

“I asked him what he had to eat last and he said, ‘A piece of toast,’ ” Richards recalled. “I knew he needed some help at that point.”

Richards called an ambulance, and Lanier was taken to Community Memorial Hospital. A few hours later, the officer dropped by to check on him. He said Lanier looked up from his hospital bed, held his hand and smiled.

“He said when he woke up this morning he prayed . . . that someone would pull him out of this living hell or let him die. It’s so sad. I knew he had really been suffering,” Richards said.

Luna, now 37 and free on bail, has pleaded not guilty to charges of felony elder abuse and fraud. Her trial is expected to begin this month..

When it does, Lanier won’t be there to testify. He died of heart failure Nov. 1, 1997--more than a year after police took him from his home. A jury is still expected to hear his story, however. Prosecutors videotaped his statements from the preliminary hearing and plan to use them at trial.

Authorities say Lanier is a textbook example of how an older person can fall victim to abuse while no one is watching. And in his case, they say, it happened more than once.

Just a month before Luna was hired, Lanier’s former caregiver, Steve Snyder, pleaded guilty to one charge of financial elder abuse for taking more than $24,000 from the man. At the time of sentencing, a judge ordered Snyder to serve two years in county jail and repay the money he had taken.

When conservator Barbara Knight took over Lanier’s finances last year, she said he was broke and deeply in debt.

“The last few months that he was alive, he was pretty happy, but he was basically penniless,” said Knight, who had visited him at the boarding facility in Oxnard where he was moved.

In her work as a conservator, Knight said she has seen seniors fleeced by grifters and ripped off by their own drug-addicted grandchildren. Such financial exploitation, she said, happens more often than people realize.

“It just seems like when times get tough, old people are easy money,” she said. “A lot of times, you get so disgusted you want to throw up your hands and walk away. But often, you become very involved because you realize these people could be your own parents or grandparents.”

An Emerging Area of Law

It is the vulnerability of these victims--the 88-year-old man who could never earn back a lifetime of savings or the 94-year-old woman whose broken bones never completely healed--that drives the push for tougher laws and aggressive investigation by law enforcement.

Elder abuse is generally split into three categories: domestic violence involving spouses or family members, institutional abuse within nursing homes or other residential care facilities, and cases of self-neglect.

Although few studies gauge the severity of the problem, research conducted by the National Center on Elder Abuse in Washington, D.C., has provided a starting place.

Based on reports to adult protective services agencies across the nation, researchers now know that neglect is the most prevalent form of domestic abuse, followed by physical abuse and financial exploitation.

The majority of victims are women--more than two-thirds--with an average age of 78. There is no significant difference in the ratio of male to female abusers.

Over the last decade, the NCEA documented a 150% increase in domestic elder abuse reports--from 117,000 in 1986 to 293,000 in 1996. But given victims’ reluctance to report, experts estimate there may be as many as 1.8 million abused elders across the country.

Meanwhile, legislation and programs addressing the issue are still evolving. No federal elder abuse laws exist, and state statutes vary.

In California, laws protecting the elderly were established in 1983. Those provisions state that willful physical abuse, neglect, sexual assault, financial exploitation or other mistreatment of a person 65 or older that creates harm or suffering can be punished by up to four years in state prison.

A sentence can be enhanced by three to five more years depending on the age of the victim and the severity of the injuries--new provisions added to the California Penal Code this year.

“It’s a new and upcoming area of the law,” said Rohn, one of two prosecutors assigned to the district attorney’s fledgling elder abuse unit.

Started in October 1996, the unit has one investigator and two victim advocates who help with everything from seeking restraining orders to obtaining medical care.

Last year, the unit reviewed 25 cases of suspected elder abuse and filed criminal charges in 18. So far this year, prosecutors have reviewed 15 cases and criminal charges have been filed in 12.

County’s 1st Probe of a Care Facility

One of the cases still under review centers on Dorothy Malven, whom authorities suspect may have been neglected while living at a now-shuttered board-and-care facility in Thousand Oaks.

A former Westlake Village resident, Malven died May 24 after being hospitalized with a deep bedsore and other wounds that state licensers say went untreated during her stay at Halina’s Residential Care.

The facility’s operator, Grazyna “Grace” Baran, could face criminal charges in connection with Malven’s injuries. Rohn declined to discuss the case, saying it is still under investigation.

At the same time, Baran is being investigated by the state Department of Social Services for possible health and safety code violations at four elder-care facilities she was licensed to operate in Thousand Oaks.

Those licenses were suspended and the facilities shut down June 4, less than two weeks after Malven’s death. Baran has contested the closure, and an administrative hearing is set for Oct 6.

Details of what happened to Malven have been closely guarded by police and prosecutors, but state reports reveal this:

Malven and her 88-year-old husband, Jack, were admitted to Halina’s on April 15. At the time, Dorothy Malven had a small, pinkish bedsore on her lower back.

But when she reached a doctor’s care a month later, the bedsore had worsened and exposed her tailbone. She also had deep sores on her ankles, elbows and heels, a gash on her right cheek, bruises on her left arm and a urinary tract infection.

According to a complaint filed by the state’s Community Care Licensing Division, Baran failed to notify the woman’s family and did not seek medical attention until Malven’s condition had worsened.

She was hospitalized at Los Robles Regional Medical Center on the afternoon of May 18 and died within a week. Jack Malven had died a month earlier. Although his death is not being investigated by local law enforcement, it is part of a state social services probe of Halina’s because licensers say it was not reported to them as required by law.

Ventura County’s long-term-care ombudsman, whose volunteers regularly inspect board-and-care facilities across the county, have said there was no reason to suspect any of Baran’s facilities had problems.

The allegations came as a shock to ombudsman administrator Suzan Neely, who told The Times in June, “This never happens in Ventura County.”

Rohn doesn’t see it that way.

“We’ve been expecting these cases because of what we’re learning is going on across the country,” she said.

Still, the Malven case is unique in that it is the first prosecutors have reviewed involving allegations of institutional abuse.

Most of the cases they see deal with domestic or financial abuse, and it is those crimes that have become the primary target for law enforcement.

It hasn’t been easy.

Many Cases, Few Caseworkers

Like other cases of domestic violence, elderly victims are often unwilling to come forward because of shame, fear or misguided loyalty to the abuser, most often a family member serving in a care-giving role.

The NCEA reports that in more than one-third of the domestic abuse cases reported in 1996, the abuser was an adult child. Spouses were responsible for one of every eight cases. Siblings or other family members accounted for about one in 10.

Sometimes, relatives become so frustrated or depressed caring for an older person that they lash out. That was the case with Alfred Pohlmeier.

Fed up with his 92-year-old wife’s constant coughing and complaints, the retired postal worker wrapped his hands around her neck and choked her to death on Sept. 13, 1995.

Pohlmeier, now 93, was convicted of second-degree murder and the jury found that he was insane at the time of the killing.

During his trial, witnesses testified that Pohlmeier was a gentle man who had lovingly cared for his wife of 61 years, Lidwina. In that respect, his case may not fall within the definition of elder abuse.

“In fairness to him, I don’t know that it is,” said Deputy Dist. Atty. Donald C. Glynn, who prosecuted the case. “On the one hand, it is the ultimate act of elder abuse in that he killed her. But really we think of elder abuse as a continuing, insidious type of thing.”

Breaking victims out of the spiral of ongoing abuse is one of the critical challenges facing authorities.

Unlike child abuse cases, in which battered or sexually abused children can be taken from their homes, social workers cannot force seniors to leave an abusive situation.

In her role as a county public health nurse, Mary Leu Pappas has tried with varying success to persuade older victims to turn in their abusers. Often, she said, their reluctance stems from fear of abandonment or the unknown.

“I can’t, as a mandated reporter, make someone change their mind,” Pappas said. “I think I can give them knowledge of what their life would be like if they would go free of this abuse.”

Just as troubling is that the agencies set up to handle abuse reports are only able to respond to a fraction.

Its funding gutted by years of budget cutbacks, the county’s Adult Protective Services Agency has only three social workers to field hundreds of reports each year. As a result, only the most severe cases get attention.

“The fact of the matter is we only have a limited staff,” said Shirley Alloway, whose agency fields between five and 20 reports a day. “As the reports come in daily, they are doing a kind of triage. It just depends on the severity. It is a very difficult decision sometimes.”

It is an issue that has created some conflict between Adult Protective Services and prosecutors, who would like to see more cases investigated and brought to the attention of law enforcement.

Last year, 830 incidents of elder abuse were reported to Adult Protective Services. Of those, more than 547 were deemed valid. Typically half of those cases involve incidents of self-neglect, which means that more than 250 involved someone beating, scamming or neglecting a senior.

Yet only 25 of those cases were reviewed by the district attorney’s office in 1997.

“We should be seeing more,” said Rohn, who has urged social workers to share incidents of alleged elder abuse with police for investigation. “In our county, there should be 300 cases that they see, and a significant number should be coming to us.”

Alloway attributes the low numbers to poor staffing and a realization by the community that her agency’s workers are so busy, chances are they won’t be able to respond to many complaints.

The caseload has left social workers in a position of simply being unable to provide counseling, case management or other services, she said.

“The community has lost faith,” Alloway said. “They realize this program has become reactionary--not proactive.”

The agency is now pinning its hopes on proposed legislation that would pump $70.3 million into adult protective services agencies statewide. State Senate Bill 2199, sponsored by Sen. Bill Lockyer (D-Hayward), would increase staffing, mandate response to all forms of elder abuse and fund a 24-hour elder abuse hotline.

For Ventura County, passage of the bill would provide about $1.5 million, money that could be used to hire additional social workers or expand hours of service, Alloway said.

The bill has been passed by the Senate Appropriations Committee but is on hold pending adoption of the state budget. That budget includes an additional $1 million for adult protective services programs statewide, continuing a funding boost begun last year.

Last year’s state funding marked the first increase for such programs in 14 years. In Ventura County, it provided $13,000 to hire a third social worker. But Alloway said much more is needed.

“We can’t pretend we can do this job with three people working 8 to 5,” she said. “We have absolutely no money to run this program.”

A Case of Agencies Working Together

All this was lost on Edna Ledford.

She knew little about pending legislation, bureaucratic infighting or the struggles of social workers burdened with too much work and too little money.

None of that can change what happened to her. None of that addresses that what she needed most was a strong door with a solid lock, and assurances that the man who hurt her wouldn’t do it again.

Ledford said she was punched in the face on Jan. 4 by Victor Ultreras, now 22, a friend of her great-grandson. Ultreras has a history of drug use and more than a dozen arrests on his record.

On that night, Ledford said, she heard noises and found Ultreras in an upstairs bedroom of her home. Angry, she asked him to leave.

“I said, ‘You get out of here!,’ ” Ledford recalled, her voice sharp and spirited. “I just thought he didn’t need to be there. It made me mad.”

After she scolded him, the intruder got up and she followed him downstairs. As he walked out the front door, he wheeled and hit her with a clenched fist, knocking her backward to the floor.

She was taken to the hospital, where X-rays showed a broken jaw and a fractured cheekbone. She also suffered a black eye and various other bruises.

After the incident, police say, Ultreras called and threatened to shoot at her house if she filed criminal charges. She did anyway.

Ultreras was arrested and charged with battery, felony elder abuse and residential burglary, Rohn said.

He pleaded guilty to the burglary charge Feb. 17, and the other charges were dismissed. A month later, Ultreras was sentenced to nine years in state prison.

“That was a huge win for us because she didn’t have to take the stand,” Rohn said. She praised the police for their investigation and cited it as a good example of how agencies can work together to put abusers behind bars.

For Ledford, the incident marked the first time she had ever been hit--a fact that stung her 66-year-old daughter, Shirley.

“What’s going on today? It’s crazy,” she said, shaking her head at the idea that someone would punch a 94-year-old woman. “The problem is, no matter what, you should know better than to hurt someone older than you.”

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Domestic Elder Abuse on the Rise

Reports of physical abuse, neglect and financial exploitation of the nation’s elderly have risen exponentially, with neglect accounting for more than half the cases.

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Elder Abuse Cases

Nationwide, reports of elder abuse in domestic settings have risen dramatically over the last decade reaching 286,000 reports in 1995 and 293,000 reports in 1996.

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Types of Domestic Elder Abuse

It is estimated that nationwide more than 1 million seniors aged 65 and older became victims of elder abuse in 1996, with the most prevalent form of abuse being neglect.

Neglect: 55%

Physical Abuse: 14.6%

Financial Abuse: 12.3%

Emotional Abuse: 7.7%

Other: 6.12%

Unknown: 4%

Sexual Assault: .3%

Source: National Center on Elder Abuse

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Signs of Abuse

Elder abuse in domestic settings is a widespread problem crossing social, economic and racial lines. More prevalent than previously realized, elder abuse fits into four general categories: physical, emotional and financial abuse, and neglect.

Neglect:

The refusal or failure to fulfill an elderly person’s needs, such as medical care, personal hygiene and nourishment.

Indicators:

* Unemployed adult children with emotional problems or criminal backgrounds are living with the elder.

* Family has a history of violence, drug or alcohol use.

* Elder is isolated or lonely, with no friends or relatives who visit.

* Family members restrict the elder’s access to other people, isolating the senior inside his or her home.

Physical Abuse:

The infliction of physical harm or injury on an elder by a person in a position of trust.

Indicators:

* Unexplained bruises, welts or burns, including those caused by ropes or other restraints.

* Soiled clothing or bedding.

* Malnourished or dehydrated.

* Poor skin condition or unkempt hair.

* An untreated medical condition.

Emotional Abuse:

The infliction of mental anguish by using cruel or demeaning language, threats or harassment such as confinement or lack of emotional support that cause concern for the elder’s safety.

Indicators:

* Elder is frightened, confused, withdrawn or depressed.

* Elder is hesitant to talk freely.

Financial Abuse:

The illegal or improper use of an elder’s money, property or assets. Forms of financial abuse include theft, fraud, scams, embezzlement, extortion or misuse of elder’s money or property.

Indicators:

* Unusual activity in bank accounts, such as ATM withdrawals although the elder cannot walk or get to the bank.

* Signatures on checks or other documents that do not resemble the elder’s handwriting, or are signed although the elder is unable to write.

* Numerous unpaid bills and overdue rent although someone has been designated to pay the bills.

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Source: Ventura County district attorney’s office and National Center on Elder Abuse

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About This Series

“Abusing the Elderly” is a two-part series exploring the growing problem of physical, emotional and financial abuse of Ventura County’s elderly. Today’s story details cases of abuse locally and legal efforts to prosecute them. Tomorrow’s piece looks at efforts to prevent such abuse and reach its silent victims.