“They’ve Killed Her” – Retired Alabama Schoolteacher Dies under State Guardianship

By Terri LaPoint

“She’s gone.” The call came in Monday from Nancy Scott regarding her mother, Marian Leonard, who had been taken from her family and placed onto hospice care against her will. Nancy was in tears when she told me that her mother died on Saturday, August 24, but nobody bothered to notify her until Monday.

Marian Leonard died in a nursing home that she was forced into by a judge in early 2018. Last month, her court-appointed guardian Sidney Summey restricted her from having any visitors except a token hour and a half visit twice per month from her daughter – the woman that Mrs. Leonard had designated as her chosen power of attorney, not just once, but 3 different times over a 30 year period.

She died alone. No family or friends were permitted to be with her in her final weeks. The guardian had even taken her away from her roommate, whom Nancy viewed as her mother’s “guardian angel.”

Nancy, who has been fighting the court since custody of her mother was seized by the state, is devastated.

It’s like being in the middle of a horror story.

All her mother’s planning to ensure that she would live out her elderly years on her own terms vanished with the stroke of a judge’s pen, at the request of social workers from the Alabama Department of Human Resources (DHR) and St. Vincent’s Hospital. The simplest request, that her only daughter be with her at the end, was denied.

Nancy’s voice cracked as she cried:

I couldn’t save her. I tried so hard to get her out of there.Marian Leonard was known to her former English students as “Mrs. Gregory.” Yearbook photo provided by family.

Under Judge Alan King, Marian Leonard was forced onto hospice care, though there was never any diagnosis of terminal illness. The only “diagnosis” was typed into the records by woman later convicted of felony Tenn-Care fraud.

Lisa Fuller apparently posed as a nursing home nurse, and ER nurse, and ambulance service worker, as evidenced by her signature on documents from all three in Tennessee. Her notes in the records sent to St. Vincent’s Hospital in Birmingham, later obtained by Nancy Scott, are the only record stating that Mrs. Leonard had Alzheimers. Other medical records show that, just the year before, she had been pronounced by medical doctors to be free of any dementia or signs of Alzheimers.

“Murdered by Hospice”?

Since her mother was taken from her family, Nancy Scott has complained that her mother was being drugged. She was increasingly being given psychotropic drugs and strong pain-killers, against her previously stated wishes and against the wishes of her daughter, the person that she wanted to be in charge of her care. Yet, the strangers appointed to care for her ignored her pleas to see her daughter, to go home, and to get out of the nursing home. Why would they pay attention to her thoughts on being drugged?

Before being forced into Diversicare of Riverchase nursing home in Birmingham, Mrs. Leonard’s typical go-to medication for occasional flair-ups of arthritis pain was a single Tylenol. Recently, Nancy learned that hospice was giving her mother morphine.

We also learned through a source who asked to be unnamed that Mrs. Leonard was being given morphine much more frequently than every 6 hours. The source explained that dosage every 6 hours is what is given for pain, but when it is given more frequently than that, it is designed to be “part of the dying process.”

Marian Leonard, who was not dying, was being given drugs to “assist with the dying process.” The only “incurable condition” that Mrs. Leonard had was simple old age. She was 103. Nancy says that her mother’s age has been used many times by many people involved with her mother’s case to justify the treatment that her mother has received under state care.

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“They’ve Killed Her” – Retired Alabama Schoolteacher Dies under State Guardianship