By Heidi Blake and Katie J.M. Baker
It was 2,000 miles away, in Florida, that a retired engineer and former Navy reservist named Doug Keegan donned a crisp suit and said his vows. His bride wore a white dress dotted with pink flowers. Monica Steele had transformed Keegan’s life since the pair met the previous year. After decades as a bachelor, he finally had someone to cook for, sing to, and teach how to swing a golf club. They had already honeymooned in Kenya. Now it was time to make it official. “When I said, ‘I’m going to love you forever,’” he later recalled, “that was cemented into my heart.”
The two couples were worlds apart in age, wealth, and social background — but their marriages had something in common that neither could have imagined. Each one would be used to support arguments that both Wynter and Keegan had mental disabilities so profound that they were incapable of making decisions about their own lives and should instead live under the control of virtual strangers.
Wynter and Keegan were sucked into America’s sprawling guardianship system, which was designed as a last-resort protection for people who are incapacitated by a mental or physical disability. Guardians who carry out their duties faithfully can provide a lifeline for those in need. But an ongoing BuzzFeed News investigation has found that the system has grown into a lucrative and poorly regulated industry that has subsumed more than a million adults.
Most of the freedoms articulated in the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights are denied to people under full guardianship: They can lose their rights to vote, marry, start a family, decide where they live, consent to medical treatment, spend their money, seek employment, or own property. It is among the most severe measures the courts can impose on a US citizen.
Our investigation has revealed how an established network of guardians, lawyers, and expert witnesses, appearing frequently before the same judges in local courts across the country, are often paid from the estate of the person whose freedom is on the line, creating many possible conflicts of interest. Guardians who work for the state get paid from government funds, sometimes overseeing hundreds of people at a time. Other wards are consigned to the care of untrained volunteers or family members. All scenarios can leave vulnerable people susceptible to abuse.
Debra Slater, an attorney who has handled hundreds of guardianship cases in Florida, said the system is intended to help people who cannot help themselves and added that the majority of guardians and lawyers work hard to ensure people in their care live the fullest lives possible. But abuses can occur, she acknowledged. “For my whole professional life, I’ve been speaking for those who cannot speak for themselves,” Slater said. “It is very frustrating to spend your life trying to do that and then to see others taking advantage and doing harm to those who need protection most.”
People whom the courts have declared to be incapacitated rarely lead straightforward lives. Wynter has serious mental health issues; Keegan has ongoing struggles with alcoholism. Caring for people under those circumstances is undoubtedly challenging. Their cases also show how people coping with complex life challenges can get trapped in guardianships that are dangerously ill suited to their actual needs and deny them what some experts call the “dignity of risk”: the right to make their own choices, both good and bad.
For Keegan and Wynter, guardianship meant being denied one of the most fundamental rights of all: to be with the person you love.
Neither had a fairy-tale marriage, but their cases raise the question of when, if ever, a third party should get to decide whether two adults deserve to be together.
When Keegan’s relatives found out he had married Steele, a Kenyan American trainee nurse, they hired lawyers to persuade a judge to put him under guardianship, blocking her access to money the family expected to inherit. Lawyers cited alcoholism and his marriage to a woman they claimed was encouraging him to drink and stealing his money as proof that he was incapable of making his own decisions. Along the way, they referred incorrectly to Steele as Keegan’s “mail-order wife” and falsely alleged he was being “grifted by Nigerian women,” records show. He was locked in a series of homes for people with severe mental impairment, while annual accounting records show his guardians spent more than $400,000 of his savings in fees and other guardianship expenses.
As a teenager living in poverty, Wynter was placed under the permanent control of a guardian without a court hearing. For months, she begged to be released from a residential facility where she said she was “in so much damn pain” and “getting worse every day.” After BuzzFeed News started looking into her claims, a state agency launched an investigation and found that staffers there had abused and neglected her.
The public rarely hears from people under guardianship, but Keegan and Wynter overcame tremendous odds to speak to BuzzFeed News about their experiences over more than seven months. They hid their communications from guardians, concealing burner phones and secretly logging on to computers. Many of the people who have been instrumental in keeping them under guardianship said it had provided them the stability they very much needed. The benefits of guardianship were obvious, they said, and claims to the contrary were lies or delusions that should not be trusted. BuzzFeed News reviewed thousands of pages of documents and conducted dozens of interviews to report on their cases.
Keegan’s and Wynter’s desperate attempts to break free — or even to
seize a simple moment of freedom, such as riding a bike or stealing a
kiss — further cemented their fates. Only one of them would escape.
Doug Keegan and Monica Steele
Courtesy Doug Keegan
Keegan first heard he was facing guardianship when a stranger
turned up at his door a few weeks after his wedding, in November 2014.
Dressed in a suit, with graying hair and a gravelly voice, he introduced
himself as Calvin Horvath, Keegan’s new court-appointed attorney.
Keegan’s family had filed a petition asking the court to place him under emergency guardianship, Horvath explained. They said that he had been incapacitated by years of excessive drinking and his new wife was trying to steal his money.
Keegan did not deny his troubles with drinking, which included several hospitalizations for severe alcohol poisoning and a DUI. He’d had spells in Alcoholics Anonymous but said he found the emphasis on a higher power off-putting, so he tried to control his drinking on his own. He was blindsided by his family’s move. “My background is I’m an alcoholic, but there’s nothing wrong with my mind,” he said. “I’m as sharp as a tack.”
After working all over the world as an electrical engineer, Keegan had retired in his early 50s to a three-bedroom condo in Orlando with soaring cathedral ceilings. He met his wife when he got lonely and advertised for housemates online. Monica Steele was an energetic trainee nurse in her late 30s who had emigrated from Kenya a decade earlier and become a US citizen. Romance quickly blossomed.
She said she loved it when he sang to her — “Tomorrow” from Annie was her favorite — and laughed at his jokes until she cried. Keegan cooked up hamburgers and steaks, and she introduced him to Kenyan staples like boiled beans with corn and peppers. He still had lapses into heavy drinking, and the relationship could get stormy, but both said Steele pushed him to stay healthy. They went to the gym together, and he taught her to ride a bike. “She was someone to share life with,” Keegan said.
When he told his relatives he had married Steele, he said, he expected some backlash, but not its ferocity.
His brother Kevin Keegan turned up at their house, the couple said, claiming Steele had only married him for money and a green card. Steele, who already had US citizenship, said she was outraged. “I loved him,” she said. “He's a very good person and a very, very intelligent man.” But the rest of the family soon joined in.
“My family didn’t like me marrying a Black girl,” Doug said.
The family painted a starkly different picture of the relationship in court filings and in responses to questions from BuzzFeed News, maintaining that the marriage was a sham and that they were trying to rescue Keegan from an exploitative situation. “My brother Douglas is the gift that just keeps on giving,” Kevin wrote in an email to BuzzFeed News. “Most of the family took turns trying to help Doug but like many alcoholics he resists AA and other available help. All the unfortunate things that have occurred to him are his own making.”
A lawyer representing Kevin challenged the suggestion that the family had objected to Steele’s race. “The truth is that Douglas has battled inner demons for quite some time now,” the lawyer wrote, adding that “Monica didn’t seem to help.”
“This is a complicated situation and the family has stepped in for his interest doing the best they could to help a loved person,” he added.
Both Keegan and Steele strongly denied that she had ever taken advantage of him. But Keegan said his relatives had never shown much interest in him before, and part of him had wanted to believe they cared. It was true that Steele was less frugal than he was; she wanted him to buy her a car, he said, and he refused. He figured those kinds of tensions were normal in any marriage, he said, but he agreed to his brother’s request to talk to a lawyer about “some sort of protection, like a postnuptial agreement.”
Emails between the newlyweds show tensions building up. “I am heartbroken and not sure what’s going on with the so-called Attorney and your family,” Steele wrote to Keegan. “I know they’re trying to create enemity [sic] between us because i am a black woman.” Keegan said he and Steele both sometimes wondered if it would be easier just to end the marriage, but they resolved to try to make it work.
The lawyer, Dean Turman, talked to Keegan about drawing up a will bequeathing his wealth to his siblings, records show. Keegan figured that was fair for the time being, since his marriage was only a few weeks old. He also signed a power of attorney — believing, he said, that it would be used to make an asset protection plan. “I didn’t perceive the threat,” he told BuzzFeed News, speaking over a burner phone.
Billing records reveal that Turman and Kevin had already met privately to discuss plans to put Keegan under some kind of guardianship — although the lawyer noted that he seemed “competent.” Using the power of attorney Keegan had signed, Turman froze his accounts, telling his bank that he was “the subject of exploitation by a woman that he has met on the internet.” Then he filed a guardianship petition on the family’s behalf, alleging that Steele had used deception to “induce the proposed Ward to marry her” and had encouraged Keegan to drink so she could steal his money.
Turman declined to respond to detailed questions from BuzzFeed News. He said aspects of this story were “absolutely false” but refused to specify his concerns.
Keegan was outraged and said he had told his lawyer to fight the incapacity petition all the way. Instead, records reveal how the actions of Horvath, along with Turman and other professionals in the case, paved the way for Keegan to lose his rights. In the first full year of the guardianship alone, they were collectively paid $140,000 from his accounts. Horvath refused to answer detailed questions from BuzzFeed News, citing confidentiality.
Keegan’s predicament reflects an all-too-common occurrence across the US, in which people facing complex personal challenges can become trapped in a system with no one fighting for their wishes.
Florida’s laws, like those of most other states, say judges should establish guardianships only when no less restrictive option is possible. But the hearings in which they are decided can conclude in just a few minutes without the consideration of any alternatives. Many states allow petitions to put people under a guardianship to be heard on an emergency “ex parte” basis — a measure that can be necessary in extreme cases where someone may pose an imminent danger to themselves or others. But that procedure can be misused to strip people of their rights without any advance warning or any chance to speak up on their own behalf. And once a person has been declared incapacitated, they generally lose their right to contract, so in most states they can’t appoint their own lawyer to speak up for them, either.
Guardianship statutes often allow court-appointed lawyers to make their own determinations about what is in the ward’s best interests, regardless of what the person wants. But that’s not the case in Florida, where the law is intended to give people who have been found incapacitated more of a voice. “If the ward expresses a wish to resist the guardianship, the attorney should zealously advocate for that,” Anthony Palmieri, the state’s leading guardianship investigator, told BuzzFeed News. “Does that always happen? No.”
Keegan said it was his understanding that he didn’t have to attend his first court date, and that Horvath had reassured him that a full hearing would follow after a panel of doctors had examined him. But that first hearing turned out to be critical.
Lawyers for the family told the judge that Keegan was a “chronic alcoholic” and repeated their claim that Steele was stealing from him. Keegan had sobered up recently, they said, but that was only because his relatives had stepped in to help him. Keegan acknowledged in later filings that his alcoholism was “a health issue” that he was “well aware of” — but he said it had been used as a “pretext” for his family’s efforts to take control of his life. “Guardianship is not a substance abuse program,” he wrote.
On the day of the hearing, Horvath read out excerpts of an email in which his client said that he would be happy to accept some help from his relatives but he was not incapacitated. “I do not believe guardianship is the best answer,” Keegan had written. “I want to believe it is in my best interest to have primary control over my financial and personal interests.”
But in contrast to his client’s stated wishes, Horvath told the court it would be “appropriate” to appoint Keegan's stepfather as his emergency temporary guardian.
The judge agreed to place Keegan under emergency guardianship “because of all these parasites gnawing at the door.”
Later, when Keegan found out that his own lawyer had agreed to the arrangement, he said his wishes had been deliberately “misrepresented” in “a mockery of due process, transparency, and rule of law.”
But that came too late. Addressing Keegan’s stepfather, the judge said, “You will possess all of his rights at this point.” (Click to continue reading)
No comments:
Post a Comment