Elder abuse case upgraded to murder in Huron County

A Huron County man charged with elder abuse in March now faces up to life in prison after prosecutors added a second-degree murder charge in connection with his mother's death.

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Elder abuse case upgraded to murder in Huron County 

Second sister pleads not guilty to murder charge and elder abuse | NBC 7 San Diego

Rebecca Wu, 53, was arrested last week along with er sister, Ingrid Wu, 52, for allegedly failing to properly care for their parents at a University City apartment. Rebecca pled not guilty on Tuesday. Ingrid entered the same plea on Monday. NBC 7's Allison Ash has the latest details on the case from the downtown courthouse. 

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Second sister pleads not guilty to murder charge and elder abuse | NBC 7 San Diego 

Judge rules Veterans Guardian violates federal law — months after lobbying efforts in Kansas

A for-profit veteran benefits claim consultant told Kansas lawmakers the company’s operations were legal. A federal judge disagreed.

By: Grace Hills 

OVERLAND PARK — A federal judge in North Carolina found that Veterans Guardian, a for-profit consultant that charges veterans for help filing their disability claims, violates federal law.

The order came just a few months after the company lobbied Kansas legislators to pass a bill that would have greenlit for-profit consultants, despite concerns that the practice may be unlawful. The bill almost became law but support for it crumbled apart in the final hours of the legislative session.

Proponents argued Feb. 3 before the House Veterans and Military Committee that a few “bad actors” ruined the for-profit consultants’ reputations by charging exorbitant fees and using suspicious marketing tactics. Bill Taylor, co-founder of Veterans Guardian, said House Bill 2214 would have reined those companies in.

“We are 100% in compliance with federal law,” Taylor testified to lawmakers in February.

In May, U.S. District Judge Catherine Eagles disagreed.

Federal law states “no individual may act as an agent or attorney in the preparation, presentation, or prosecution of any claim,” unless they are accredited — which Veterans Guardian and the other for-profit consultants are not. Veterans who want help reviewing a claim can get help from an attorney or claims agent in exchange for a fee, which could include a portion of the veteran’s benefits.

Opponents have called the for-profit consultants “claim sharks,” and argue that charging veterans thousands — even tens of thousands — for a service that is offered for free by accredited services is predatory.

Eagles’ order outlined how the Pinehurst, North Carolina-based Veterans Guardian charged the three plaintiffs between $1,880 and $21,360. The $21,360 fee was for an initial disability claim.

“The evidence is undisputed that (Veterans) Guardian is not accredited, that on behalf of veterans it prepares claims forms, that in those forms it presents disability claims for decision by the (Veterans Affairs), and that it charges fees for doing so,” Eagles wrote in her order. “These actions violate federal law.”

Veterans Guardian was founded in 2017. The federal law Eagles cited has existed since long before then. Veterans Guardian, and similar for-profit consultants, have operated through a legal loophole.

An NPR investigation found that in 2006, as the U.S. was at war with Iraq, Congress thought veterans needed more options to navigate the disability claims process. For-profit consultants repeat that rationale today — that veterans deserve a choice between their paid, streamlined services or free but more complex accredited ones.

That year, Congress stripped the criminal penalties for violating the law — but kept the law on the books. That meant companies like Veterans Guardian have been able to use that loophole to continue operating without consequences.

Multiple bills have been introduced to reinstate the criminal penalties, but none has passed. Veterans Guardian has spent millions lobbying on the federal level. A federal bill similar to the Kansas one — that would allow for-profit consultants to legally charge veterans — advanced in the U.S. House.

After Eagles’ order, more congressional attempts at criminalization were introduced in the U.S. House and Senate. U.S. Rep. Sharice Davids, D-Kansas, signed onto the legislation Monday, a spokesperson said.

A spokesperson for Republican U.S. Sen. Jerry Moran, who chairs the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee, didn’t provide a comment in time for this story.

Anthony Pierce, counsel to Veterans Guardian, said the company “strenuously disagrees” with the court’s ruling.

“The ruling is not final, and Veterans Guardian will vigorously pursue all available avenues of appeal to defend our work on behalf of disabled veterans,” Pierce said. 

Full Article & Source:
Judge rules Veterans Guardian violates federal law — months after lobbying efforts in Kansas 

Opinion - They calculated that New York nursing home families would move on. They were wrong.

by Vivian Zayas, opinion contributor

There is a calculation that powerful people sometimes make when the victims of their decisions are elderly. It goes like this: the families will grieve, the news cycle will move on, and if you wait long enough, time does the work that accountability never had to. For six years, the families of over 15,000 New Yorkers who died in nursing homes have been proving that calculation wrong.

In a letter issued this month, Rep. Claudia Tenney (R-N.Y.) wrote to Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche demanding an answer to a question that should not require a congressional letter: what is the status of the criminal referral against former Gov. Andrew Cuomo?

That a letter was necessary tells you everything about where we are.

Every person in a nursing home is someone's mother. Someone's father. Someone's grandmother. They are not abstractions. They are people with histories, with families, with someone who loved them. People who needed care they could not get at home, and who trusted that the system governing that care had standards worth the name. Andrew Cuomo knew this. On March 24, 2020, he declared: "My mother is not expendable. And your mother is not expendable. And our brothers and sisters are not expendable."

The next day, his administration issued a directive ordering nursing homes to accept COVID-positive patients without testing. Thousands died. When families demanded to know how many, they were given a number that a 104-page congressional referral later documented was falsified. The actual death toll was undercounted by approximately 50 percent.

Cuomo testified to Congress in June 2024 that he was not involved in drafting the report. Evidence suggested otherwise. There were emails. Edited drafts. His own handwritten notes in the margins. The subcommittee referred him to the Department of Justice for making false statements to Congress in October 2024. The Biden Department of Justice received that referral. It did nothing.

House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman James Comer resubmitted the referral in April 2025. An investigation was reportedly opened. Then silence. Pam Bondi was removed from her post as attorney general in April. Her replacement has not publicly addressed the referral. Cuomo ran for mayor of New York City twice. He lost both times. His team argued prosecution was election interference. That argument no longer holds. There is no election left. There is only the question of whether the rule of law applies equally to a powerful former governor as it does to anyone else.

That question remains unanswered.

Voices for Seniors was founded six years ago by families who refused to accept that calculation. We have testified before Congress and written to two attorneys general. We have written op-eds, given interviews, made calls and knocked on doors in Washington that were sometimes opened and sometimes shut. We did all of this while grieving. Because we understood early on what the powerful were counting on: that eventually, we would stop.

If thousands of children had died under these circumstances, if a directive had sent infectious patients into facilities housing children, if the death count had been falsified, if a cover-up had been documented line by line before Congress, there would have been a commission. There would have been prosecutions. There would have been the kind of reckoning that follows tragedies where the victims are young and the public refuses to look away.

Our loved ones were old. And someone calculated that their families might eventually move on.

The congressional letter sent today by Tenney is not a legal filing. It will not compel the Department of Justice to act. But it is a public declaration that the people elected to represent New York's families have not forgotten either. And it matters, because silence from the powerful only works when no one is watching.

We are watching. We have been watching for six years. And we will keep asking is there one standard of accountability in this country, or are there two: one for the powerful, and one for everyone else?

The families we represent know which answer they have been living with. Six years of it. And they are still proving that calculation wrong.

Grief has a long memory. We haven't forgotten. And neither, we hope, will the Department of Justice.

Full Article & Source:
Opinion - They calculated that New York nursing home families would move on. They were wrong.

What Will Guardianship Law Do When You Can No Longer Stand Alone? Lessons from the Brooke Astor Case

by Philip C. Marshall

Summary 

• Socialite Brooke Astor, who at age 104 had Alzheimer’s, had a son who was convicted of 14 counts of elder abuse against her; now, her grandson advocates for senior lawyers to recognize and challenge when guardianship proceedings are protecting one’s legal rights or stripping them away.
• Guardianship can strip adults of nearly all legal rights through procedures that fall below the constitutional standards applied to far less consequential deprivations—a gap senior lawyers are positioned to recognize and challenge.
• The disability rights framework of supported independence—scaffolding without confiscating sovereignty—offers a principled standard for measuring whether the law is honoring or merely managing human vulnerability.
• Senior lawyers bring irreplaceable authority to guardianship reform: professional credibility, lived proximity to aging, and the persuasive precision of those who have insisted on reasoned process throughout their careers.

The system worked. That is what has troubled me ever since.

In 2006, I petitioned a New York court to protect someone I loved—my grandmother, Brooke Astor, then 104 years old. The court agreed. What I could not have fully articulated at the time, and what I have spent the years since trying to name, is this: The same system capable of protecting her was also capable of erasing her by removing her rights. The difference was not the law itself. It was who was present, who was credible, and who could afford to persist.

You already know how to spot when due process is being honored and when it is being performed. You have spent careers insisting on reasoned findings, reviewable records, and procedural integrity. This piece asks you to point that same professional discernment at a system you may not yet have examined closely—and at a life stage that is no longer abstract.

The System Lawyers Are Built to Question

Guardianship is widely understood as a protective remedy—a last resort, carefully applied. In practice, it can operate as a near-total reassignment of legal agency: control over residence, medical decisions, finances, relationships, and access to courts transferred to a third party, sometimes effectively permanently.

The doctrinal label is “protective.” But protection is a purpose, not a constitutional exemption.

When the interests at stake in other legal contexts are this sweeping—civil commitment, termination of parental rights, major deprivations of liberty—the system demands heightened procedural protection and reviewable reasons. Guardianship touches interests at least as foundational, and yet the procedural floor is often among the lowest the civil system tolerates: truncated hearings, conclusory findings, reliance on untested evaluations, and an appellate posture that treats judicial discretion as self-justifying.

A right without a workable remedy is not a right in practice. It is an aspiration. And the people most likely to need the remedy are often least able to use it—lacking funds for independent counsel, unable to initiate proceedings without access to communications or resources held by the very guardian they would challenge, and facing health timelines that outrun appellate calendars.

You recognize this pattern. You have argued against it in other courtrooms.

A Life-Course View that the Law Has Not Caught Up With

There is a structural gap in how the law thinks about personhood over time.

The law is strong in the middle—in the world of contracts, commerce, torts, and ordinary civil procedure, where the idealized independent adult is assumed. But the human life course does not stay in the middle. It begins in dependency. It often returns to dependency. Disability does not observe a schedule—it may be present from birth, arrive through illness or injury, or accumulate gradually with age. If the law protects autonomy only for the fully capable adult at full capacity, it is not a code of justice. It is a code of convenience.

The disability rights movement understood this before elder law did. Its core insight—that the problem is often not the person but the environment, and that impairment is a reason to provide supports rather than reduce rights—is the civil rights framework most explicitly built around the human condition as it actually is: interdependent, fluctuating, and embodied.

That framework has a name that is useful here: supported independence. Not substituted judgment, where the system replaces the person. And not only supported decision-making, which is already on the books in a majority of states as a less restrictive alternative, though chosen infrequently by courts, and tends to remain focused on the transaction rather than the person. Supported independence adds the relational dimension: the recognition that autonomy is not a solo achievement but a shared one, sustained by the people and institutions that surround us.

It is the proposition that the law should supply scaffolding without confiscating sovereignty. That vulnerability is not a reason for erasure but a reason for reinforced rights.

When the Preamble to the Constitution named among its founding purposes the obligation to “secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity,” the founders were not drafting a rule of decision. They were naming what the whole enterprise of law is for—the frame within which every code, every procedure, every adjudication should be measured. Supported independence belongs in that tradition. It is not a statute to be litigated or a mechanism to be administered. It is a standard—and the question this piece puts to the profession is whether the system we have built is finally ready to be measured against it.

What Senior Lawyers Already Know How to Read

This is not merely a philosophical aspiration. It has operational content—and senior lawyers are among the best-positioned people in any setting to recognize when it is being honored and when it is being ignored.

• Presume agency. Justify every restriction. You have argued this in other contexts. The burden belongs on the system to prove the necessity of limitations, not on the person to prove their worthiness of rights they have never forfeited.
• Offer supports before substituting judgment. Less restrictive alternatives—advance planning instruments, supported decision-making arrangements, limited financial assistance, care navigation, community-based services—must be real options, not rhetorical gestures. A system that names them without resourcing them has not offered an alternative. It has described one.
• Make findings specific and functional. Capacity is not binary. A finding that someone “lacks capacity” without specifying what they cannot do, which rights are affected, and why narrower measures are insufficient is not a legal determination. It is a conclusion dressed as one.
• Records should be reviewable, and reasons should be transparent. Confidentiality can be protected through proportionate means. Opacity that forecloses accountability has not protected the person. It has protected the proceeding.
• Appoint counsel that is genuinely independent. Counsel that is appointed but not resourced, present but not empowered, is a procedural gesture. The person’s voice is not a gesture. It is the constitutional center.
• Make the exit real. Restoration cannot be mythical. Periodic review, a meaningful path to modification or termination, and a presumption that rights return when justification fades—these are not generous additions to the system. They are what make it a legal system rather than an administrative one.

Why This Audience, and Why Now

Joan Erikson’s contributions to the developmental model she built alongside her husband Erik are too often absorbed into his name rather than credited in her own. In her nineties, after Erik’s death, she described what she called a ninth stage of life—an account of vulnerability and trust at the far edge of experience. At its center she placed gerotranscendence: a shift in very late life toward a more expansive orientation, freed from what no longer matters. It remains among the most courageous acts of scholarship in the field.

At its center is a question about trust—not the trust of infancy, which is a question of caregivers, but the trust of late life, which is a question of systems. Can I trust the institutions that claim to protect me? Can I trust that help will not cost me myself?

For lawyers in the Senior Lawyers Division, this is not an abstraction. It is either approaching or already present in the lives of friends, spouses, siblings, clients, and—with honesty—ourselves. The lawyer who has spent decades insisting on reasoned decision-making in other contexts is in the best possible position to bring that same insistence to this one.

Not from a podium. In conversation—at ABA gatherings, with family members navigating a diagnosis, with colleagues whose clients are aging, with journalists and legislators who have not yet heard the argument made with professional precision by someone who has lived it from the inside.

That is the generative move available to this audience. Not a new doctrine for its own sake, but a more honest continuity between what the law promises and what it actually delivers—to the clients you have served, to the people you love, and eventually, if you are fortunate to live long enough, to yourself.

The law’s highest function is not to manage human vulnerability. It is to honor it.

That is the kind of code worthy of the next 250 years.

Full Article & Source:
What Will Guardianship Law Do When You Can No Longer Stand Alone? Lessons from the Brooke Astor Case 

See Also:
Family, friends, and neighbors are at the heart (and the heart) of elder justice

‘The Ultimate Betrayal’: Grandson Of Victim Explains Signs Of Elderly Financial Abuse

Brooke Astor’s grandson makes case for ‘Elder Abuse’ postage stamp

Brooke Astor's Grandson Fights Against Elder Abuse

Georgia caregiver arrested after videos show alleged ‘hateful’ abuse of patients

Ann Cowan, a caregiver at Corinth Road Personal Care Home in Newnan, has been arrested and charged with two counts of exploitation and intimidation of disabled adults, elderly persons, and residents. The charges follow allegations of elder abuse, including leaving medication out of reach for a wheelchair-bound resident and assaulting an elderly man with dementia. Cowan is currently in jail with a bond set at $10,000. A former coworker who witnessed some of the alleged abuse hopes that coming forward will encourage others to do the same. 

Source:
Georgia caregiver arrested after videos show alleged ‘hateful’ abuse of patients 

California nurse charged with 77 felonies, including alleged elder abuse

by Vivian Chow 

A California woman who worked as a registered nurse was charged with 77 felonies, including alleged elder abuse, theft and more.

Rosanne Marquis, 71, had been operating an unlicensed in-home health care business in Santa Barbara, according to the Santa Barbara County District Attorney’s Office.

While running the business, Marquis is accused of stealing from “elderly dependent adults, including a veteran, and failed to both supply accurate tax returns for her business, and to make required deductions and payments to the Employment Development Department on behalf of her employees for several years,” court documents said.

Although authorities have not disclosed how much money she reportedly stole, court records obtained by the Santa Barbara Independent noted that it totaled over $100,000.

Before she opened Rosanne Marquis HomeCare Service, the suspect worked as a trauma nurse coordinator at Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital. 

She also previously served on the boards of the Council of Alcohol and Drug Abuse and the Alzheimer’s Women’s Initiative, the Santa Barbara Independent reported.

Marquis was arrested in April. On June 9, she was charged with 77 felonies in connection with the crimes. She remains out of custody on bail.

The case was investigated by members of the Santa Barbara District Attorney’s Office, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, Office of Inspector General, and the California Employment Development Department. 

Full Article & Source:
California nurse charged with 77 felonies, including alleged elder abuse

Elkhart woman sentenced in guardianship fraud case

by Jon Zimney

An Elkhart woman has been sentenced to prison after admitting to fraud involving a disabled adult under her care.

 

Debra Collins pleaded guilty to one count of fraud after authorities found she improperly spent Social Security benefits belonging to the victim. Prosecutors say Collins transferred thousands of dollars from the victim’s account and used the money for personal expenses, including purchases at retail stores and online shopping.

 

Collins was sentenced to four-and-a-half years, with one year suspended. She will serve 18 months in prison, followed by home detention and probation. 

Full Article & Source:
Elkhart woman sentenced in guardianship fraud case 

Horrifying details released in case against suspended Jefferson County Probate Judge Yashiba Blanchard

by  Apryl Marie Fogel

A scathing 120-page complaint outlines seven charges against Jefferson County Probate Judge Yashiba Blanchard.

"Judge Blanchard's conduct has degraded the public's confidence in the integrity of the judiciary and brought the judicial office into disrepute. Judge Blanchard's delay and lack of attention in handling her cases have harmed the litigants, protected persons, respondents, family members, attorneys, healthcare professionals, healthcare services, and others who have business before the Probate Court," the report explains.

The meticulously detailed complaint alleges that Blanchard's behavior made life miserable for court staff, created a "threat to public safety," kept individuals hospitalized longer than necessary and created a logjam of cases.

The charges against Blanchard include:

1. Pattern and practice of failing to diligently discharge judicial duties
2. Pattern and practice of failing to follow the law
3. Pattern and practice of exhibiting bias against attorneys appearing in Judge Blanchard's court
4. Failure to disqualify from a case in which Judge Blanchard served as an attorney
5. Harassment, intimidation, and retaliation against probate court staff
6. Allowing other court officials subject to Judge Blanchard's direction and control to engage in harassment and intimidation of probate court staff
7. Failure to maintain professional competence in judicial administration

The report repeatedly states that Blanchard was late to hearings on her schedule.

"Judge Blanchard told her staff on one occasion that she was late to her involuntary commitment docket because she had three dogs to walk," the complaint says.

Included in the report is one of three emails from hospital staff to the court regarding the consequences of the judge's delay of the case:

“With the cancellation and the rescheduling of her hearing to December 2, this patient will now remain hospitalized for an additional two weeks solely due to the lack of timely access to the hearing process. This not only prevents her from being home with her family for Thanksgiving, but it also generates unnecessary hospitalization costs and creates avoidable emotional distress for the patient and her loved ones.

Beyond this single case, the cancellation of the docket disrupts unit flow, delays care for other patients needing admission which can pose a threat to public safety and places our staff in untenable operational positions. It is difficult to reconcile today's action with our shared responsibility to ensure patients receive timely due process and appropriate, least-restrictive care.

The sequence of events today reflects a disregard for the rights of our patients, the time and safety of their families, and the operational efficiency of the hospital.”

Following repeated emails advocating for the patient, Blanchard set a new hearing on November 20 and released the patient.

In another case, an individual was held for 18 days before having a hearing. State law says:

“When any respondent sought to be committed has any limitation imposed upon his liberty or any temporary treatment imposed upon him by the probate judge pending final hearings on such petition, the probate judge, at the time such limitation or treatment is imposed, shall set a probable cause hearing within seven days of the date of such imposition.”

Among the human resources complaints are accusations that the court's chief clerk and several other employees who were transferred from the Birmingham Probate Court building in downtown Birmingham to the Bessemer location, at times with little to no work or duties commensurate with their skill and pay level, were subjected to acts of retaliation or for no reason at all.

While each of those moved has their stories shared in the report, one shows a level of indifference that would shock even the hardest hearts.

“Another clerk sent an email to Judge Blanchard and to the Place 2 Judge on August 28, 2025, asking if she could be moved back to the Birmingham Division because her sister was dying of cancer. The clerk liked to visit her sister in the evenings after work and assist with her daily needs, and the commute to Bessemer-which was 35-40 minutes longer through heavy traffic-made visiting her sister more difficult. The Place 2 Judge expressed to the employee in person that there was nothing she could do because Judge Blanchard was the·Presiding Judge of the Probate Court. Judge Blanchard never responded to the email at all. Shortly thereafter, the clerk's sister died. The clerk was unable to make it to the hospital in time to say goodbye because she was stuck in traffic driving to the hospital from Bessemer.”

The full report details how Blanchard's actions affected hundreds of conservatorship and guardianship cases, as well as a detailed account of bar complaint filings and other conduct that led to charges.

Complaint Against Jefferson County Probate Judge Yashiba Blanchard by aprylmarie.fogel

On Thursday, Blanchard was suspended from the bench, and retired Judge Sherri Friday was sworn in. 

Full Article & Source:
Horrifying details released in case against suspended Jefferson County Probate Judge Yashiba Blanchard 

See Also:
Suspended Jefferson County probate judge accused of election interference in new lawsuit

Jefferson County judge suspended, complaint says she called herself “ultimate authority”

Glamorous judge accused of bullying, intimidation and delaying cases so she could take her DOGS for a walk