When a Caregiver Becomes a Predator - Any Tales To Tell, Lamorinda?

She was friendly, outgoing, brought her kids to the nursing hospital and insisted they call a cousin there for his last days "Grandpa." We'll call her Kim, mainly because she's in jail now.

Everyone loved her. The nurses loved her. The hospital operators loved her. Even our cousin liked her, and he was notoriously tough on people. We thought everything was good and he was getting the best of care until the day when, soon after cousin lost his ability to speak, I asked him if Kim was taking good care of him. His eyes, dulled by age and ailments, acquired their old flinty fire and he shook his head, giving me an emphatic "thumbs down."

Now, our cousin did that routinely but I filed the reaction away and waited until our bedridden relative's credit card receipts arrived in the mail. It turned out he was getting around town and doing quite a lot for a wheel chair-bound octogenarian who couldn't say his own name, much less order the pizza, videos, manicures, and groceries the sales receipts declared he was buying.

We started asking questions, and our family finally found a detective with time enough to listen. Armed with the sales receipts we charted a pattern and pinpointed the times when the cards were being used. Surely there would be a photographic record of the transaction?

We were lucky. There was. And it was Kim.

Kim getting her mani-pedi, Kim ordering chicken at Churches, her videos at Blockbuster. Before she was arrested and confessed it turned out she was charging upwards of $2,000 a month on our relative's credit cards. At first she tried to tell us... and the police... that our cousin wanted her to have "a little something for herself" and authorized the charges, but that was a direct contradiction of the nursing home's rules regarding employee compensation. Ultimately, Kim confessed to finding the cards in our cousin's dresser drawer, and to using them for her own needs.

She was sentenced to spend a year in county jail.

The story is not a happy one. Immediately after Kim confessed our family went through the agony of guilt and second thoughts, wondering if perhaps we should have let things go. Our detective was not so forgiving.

"You were lucky," he told us. "We see this all the time... and more often than not they get away with it and go on to do it to someone else's parent."

And that's what is worrying Moragan John Eriksen, a local man with a horror story of his own.

Like many families in Lamorinda John was trying to provide competent care for his aging mother while providing for his two sons. The family went through an agency and finally found a caregiver they liked. After six months her agency fired her, Eriksen said, but would not tell them why. After a futile hunt for the right person they went back to her, we'll call her "Lillian," and contracted with her as an independent caregiver.

But things quickly went wrong.

"Lillian came to stay for two nights while I went to a baseball tournament with the kids," Eriksen said. "When I got back on Monday, I got a notice that $10,000  had been transferred into the checking account, which I didn't do. I got out the check book and saw that several checks were missing. It turned out Lillian wrote  5 to 6 checks for about $9,000 to $10,000. After a lengthy audit, I found a few more thousand missing from earlier in the month."

Eriksen contacted Orinda police and the district attorney's office and his mother was interviewed. But it quickly became apparent that her recollection of events would be a problem.

"They told me that with my mom's bad memory and the time it would take, mom may die before her case ever made it to court and it wasn't worth their time," Eriksen said. Lillian agreed to repay half of the missing money, but Eriksen said he "never saw a dime" before she disappeared.

Still stinging over the loss, Eriksen did some more digging and found out that Lillian was "known to police," though he was unable to determine what her prior offenses had been. It also turned out that the father of her children was in jail during the time she was caring for Eriksen's mother.

Although many of us have been blessed by the presence of selfless professionals whose care and attentions have made all the difference for people trying to maintain the level of care needed for an aging family member, Eriksen struck a cautionary note -- a point he wanted to drive home after finding that Lillian is back in the area and working, as a caregiver.

"I just hope that whomever has a parent in that situation will check up on the finances before its too late," he said.