Abrupt Eviction Touches Off Probe

Wanda Ashcroft is a proud woman, still sharp as a diamond’s edge, but at 90 years old she expects to feel her age. She expected the eyes to go, and they are. She expected the bones to weaken a bit, and they have, resulting in a nasty spill in December.

She did not expect to be evicted from her retirement home because she was getting too frail.

But that’s what happened, and state regulators are investigating whether the Wellington at Laguna Hills failed to take the necessary steps before evicting Ashcroft with three days’ notice.

“I said: ‘This is three days before Christmas. What do you expect me to do?’ ” her daughter, 60-year-old Gretchen Cates, a Lake Forest retiree, said Thursday. “They said: ‘She has to go.’ I said: ‘How cruel can you be?’ ”

Arthur Carter, district manager of Community Care Licensing in Orange County--a division of the California Department of Social Services and the agency that regulates assisted-living facilities--said his agency expects to issue the Wellington a citation for failing to follow proper eviction procedures.

Citing confidentiality issues, officers at the home, which has 280 residents and is one of the largest facilities of its kind in Orange County, declined to discuss specifics of Ashcroft’s case. But they said they were attempting to follow state regulations when they evicted her.

Phil Heim, the Wellington’s plant operations manager, said that when Ashcroft returned to the Wellington after a hospital stay, and was no longer able to get around on her own, the administration had no choice.

“The state does not allow me to keep her there,” said Judy Krause, the Wellington’s executive director for the past five years. “We need to move people to a higher level of care. It’s a tough, sad thing that we have to do. . . . It’s a very difficult thing on everybody.”

Ashcroft had lived in Glendale for 43 years before deciding in 1990 to move closer to her daughter. She settled on the Wellington, a 234-unit, 314,000-square-foot home off Moulton Parkway that offers its residents a putting green, manicured gardens, a cozy parlor and a long list of activities.

All was well until Dec. 4. Suffering from Paget’s disease, a chronic bone disorder, Ashcroft fell on her way to the kitchen and was taken to a hospital for about a week.

When she returned to the Wellington, however, she was unable to get around by herself. Her fifth-floor apartment had no direct exit, and she could have been in danger if a fire had broken out. On Dec. 22, according to Cates, Ashcroft received a notice that she needed to be out in three days.

That violated state regulations, said Carter and Dan McGuire, a Community Care Licensing program analyst.

In most cases, elderly people are given at least 30 days’ notice before they are thrown out of assisted-living centers. In some cases, such facilities are allowed to evict tenants in just three days, officials said. But that’s reserved for the most severe cases--typically when a tenant poses a danger to others by smoking in bed or other hazardous activities. This was not one of those cases, Carter said.

Worse, state regulators were never given the chance to weigh in at all, they said. Any attempt to evict someone in three days from an assisted-living facility has to be approved by the state, and the state received no notice of the home’s intentions, Carter said.

Ashcroft, who paid $2,950 per month in room and board at the Wellington, has moved in with Cates.

She is comfortable, her daughter said, but the family is not through fighting.

“She feels like she’s at home,” Cates said. “She’s not afraid anymore of what’s going to happen to her.”