I am a: Quirky sysadmin. Geek. Gamer. Comic fangirl. My little space, my home on the interwebs. I blog about personal stuffs, work, various coding projects, and anything else I feel like.

She’ll probably want to smack me for calling her that. ;)

As someone who’s been victim to identity theft, my heart goes out to Raven and her family. She recently posted about her family’s findings about her grandfather (now deceased) who was being abused by his caretaker. That in itself is heinous, but to add insult to injury, his caretaker had also stolen his identity and depleted his savings, writing checks and using his credit cards. Reading her story infuriated me, not only bringing back my personal memories dealing with FuckHead, but also in thinking about how I would feel if my beloved Gramps had been treated that way by one of his caretakers.

An open call for help

Those who have been keeping up with this journal over the past week or so are already familiar with the situation I am in, for the most part. For anyone else, here is an overview. I did not put in a cut, as I really need everyone to see this.

My grandfather died at the age of 94 about 8 days ago. This followed an emergency trip to the hospital, where it was found that he had bled out through an intestinal tear. My parents decided to put him in hospice care rather than subject him to radical or invasive procedures, which was in accordance with his wishes. He died about 18 hours later.

At this point my parents started trying to put his affairs in order. As they filled out the death certificate, a nurse took my mother and her sister, my aunt, aside to tell them that she believed my grandfather had been severely abused by his caretaker, and if they had been able to save him, she would have personally intervened to keep him from being sent back to his caretaker to spare him a great deal of pain. He had bruises in several stages of healing all over his body, and possibly worse injuries as well.

The hospital records, over 100 pages corroborated this abuse pattern over the past few years. However, Texas, the state where he resides does not have a mandatory abuse reporting policy apparently, so no one bothered to report it to adult protective services. Then, as my mother tried to continue putting his affairs in order, she was stunned to realize that this same caretaker had used my grandfather’s credit cards to make purchases and drained his entire life savings to the point where he did not even have any money to live on. Even two days after his death, this woman was still writing checks in his name, obvious forgeries of his signature on each.

This explained to us several references in his letters about being tired of living and wishing God would take him away from his pain. None of us knew this was going on, and apparently even my grandfather’s financial advisors noticed the pattern but did not see fit to notify the rest of the family for whatever reason.

My family contacted the Lubbock, Texas police and were told flatly that they refused to get involved at all and would not pursue the case or try and find the caretaker. They contacted adult protective services and found out that the police should have suggested an autopsy to prove abuse, but it was too late as my grandfather had been cremated. Apparently they can only intervene if there is a live person to question or an intact body. The attorney they found also basically told my mother that this was not a winnable case. After contacting the credit card companies about the theft of my grandfather’s identities, one company told my mother that they too refused to get involved at all.

At this point, we just want to see the caretaker prosecuted for her fraud, have the bills in my grandfather’s name cleared and make sure the woman does not do this to anyone else’s loved ones. The money, my grandfather’s savings that he had been building since just after the Depression, when he first started building his accounting firm is probably not retrievable, though it would be wonderful if it was.

This is an open request for help from me and my family. If you have any suggestions at all of how we can at least get someone to help us on this, we would be very grateful. Please re-post this to lists and pass it along, as any help at this point would be welcome. We are drowning in bills that were run up by this caretaker, and the police, lawyers, and credit company will not help us. The only people who have aided us are the hospital staff, who have come forward with statements. However, this does not really help since the police will not listen and my family does not know where else to turn.

I can’t pretend to know how Raven is feeling. I know it has got to be frustrating as hell when local authorities, credit companies, and legal venues are not helping in even pursuing possible prosecution of the caretaker! That woman took the old man for everything he had (and physically abused him on top of that!!) and left a mountain of bills in her financially destructive wake for the family to sort out.

Anyone with ideas or advice for Raven and her family, please take a moment to leave a comment on her post.