by Jake Pearson, illustrations by Dominic Bodden
The temperature was plummeting on Thanksgiving eve when Judith
Zbiegniewicz wrapped herself in a blanket, picked up her phone and
tapped out yet another plea for help to New York Guardianship Services.
It was 2018, and for the previous five years the company, whose slogan
is “caring that makes a difference,” had overseen nearly every major
decision in her life, as it did for hundreds of New Yorkers deemed
incapable by the courts of looking after themselves.
The organization had
repeatedly maintained in court filings that Zbiegniewicz, who was 65 and
suffered from depression and anxiety, was doing well under its
supervision and that the Queens apartment it had placed her in was the
“best and only place for her.” Each year, court examiners reviewed the
reports and a judge signed off on their assessments.
In truth, though,
Zbiegniewicz lived in squalor on the second floor of a dilapidated home
whose roof had partially collapsed. She’d complained when her mattress
teemed with bedbugs and when rats gnawed the legs of her kitchen chairs.
Yet every month, her legally appointed guardian had taken $450 in
compensation from her bank account as her living conditions
deteriorated.
Now, with no heat and a
cold front barreling down on the city, she stuffed bath towels under a
door to block the draft and again appealed to NYGS.
“While you and every one at
the guardianship are home in a warm house and having Thanksgiving
dinner think of me. In a apartment without heat and can’t,cook. And rats
in the kitchen,” she wrote on the evening of Nov. 21, 2018. “So much
for where caring makes a difference.”
Three decades ago, New York
was at the vanguard of a national movement to prevent such
exploitation. State lawmakers passed progressive legislation to codify
wards’ civil rights and maximize their independence. Under the law,
guardianships were supposed to be tailored to the needs of the
individual, with regular court examination to safeguard their welfare.
But today, the system is
in shambles, leaving thousands of vulnerable New Yorkers sequestered,
voiceless and forgotten while the officials who oversee their care
struggle to ensure it, according to a ProPublica investigation. In New
York City, there are just over a dozen judges to handle the 17,411
people in guardianships, data provided by the courts show. With that
load, cases can sit for years without any kind of meaningful oversight.
The hardest hit are poor New Yorkers like Zbiegniewicz, whom the state
has entrusted to a network of loosely regulated nonprofits. The outcomes
for some of these individuals — known in industry parlance as the
“unbefriended,” because they have no family or anyone else to help them —
have been dire.
In one case, a guardian
didn’t notice his ward had died and continued to collect payments for
the man’s care even after his death. In another, a guardian told the
court in a report that they didn’t know where their ward was for a year.
Case managers had visited her apartment but never went in. Eventually a
utility worker discovered the woman’s corpse, covered in maggots,
decomposing in her own bed.
That the 1990s reforms
have failed has been an open secret for years among advocates, lawyers
and judges, who have repeatedly called for an overhaul. But the state
lawmakers and judicial leaders who have the power to improve it have not
done so — even as cases like that of Britney Spears have brought national attention to the issue of guardianships.
ProPublica reviewed
hundreds of pages of court records, interviewed dozens of lawyers and
experts and talked to the wards who are least equipped to advocate for
themselves. What we found is that some of the remedies that policymakers
introduced 30 years ago to bolster care and curb abuse, like minimum
qualifications for guardians and court examination of their reports, are
in dire need of an upgrade.
Today, for example, it is
far easier in New York to become a guardian than a nail technician.
Parties need only complete a day-long course — far less training than is
required in some other states,
including California, Texas and Florida. And oversight of their work is
similarly threadbare, consisting primarily of a court-appointed
examiner who focuses almost exclusively on financial paperwork and a
judge who signs off on the examination. But with thin ranks of
reviewers, annual assessments can take years to complete. And officials
rarely, if ever, see the wards in person.
The easy entry and lack of
oversight, critics say, has helped attract unscrupulous nonprofits that
take advantage of the wards they are supposed to protect.
In 2015, the chief
financial officer of one nonprofit was convicted for stealing more than
$50,000 from a ward’s accounts, government documents show. That same
year, state regulators found that another nonprofit improperly loaned
its top officials more than $250,000 while wards were unnecessarily kept
in nursing homes.
Today, even those who
helped write the state’s main guardianship statute, known as Article 81
of the Mental Hygiene Law, concede the yawning gap between its promise
and its practice has rendered it, in the words of one, “basically
pointless.”
“Keeping people out of
guardianship in the first place is the single most important thing to
do, because once you’re in it, it’s the toilet you get flushed down,”
said Kristin Booth Glen, a former judge who helped craft the law and has
called for reform for years. New York’s oversight of guardianships has
been “a total and utter disaster,” she said.
Few groups illustrate the
consequences of that failure better than NYGS, the organization that was
supposed to care for Zbiegniewicz. Over the past decade, the company
has grown to become one of the largest providers in the business,
drawing $450 in monthly compensation each from hundreds of wards’
accounts while providing as few services as possible, according to court
documents and six people familiar with the company’s operations,
including former employees.
“Everybody is shirking
responsibility,” said Carla Billini, the former director of case
management for NYGS. She resigned last April after a decade in the job,
saying she was fearful that the company’s practices would result in harm
to wards. “How is there nobody above the guardian who watches all the
guardians?”
A spokesperson for the
Office of Court Administration, which runs New York’s court system, said
that judges face “extremely challenging circumstances” but do the best
they can under the law. “The caseloads are extremely high and individual
cases can persist for decades,” he said. “Yet, the courts never give up
in searching for solutions to ensure the well-being of some of
society’s most underserved populations.”
NYGS executives declined
to be interviewed for this story. In a statement, Sam Blau, the
company’s chief financial officer, said that as a fiduciary he was
barred from answering questions “about any specific client.” However, he
noted, “we are accountable to the Court and our annual accounts and
reports are scrutinized by Court appointed examiners and any issues
would be addressed.” NYGS did not answer written questions about the
company’s broader business practices.
In his statement, Blau
called ProPublica’s reporting “misguided, without full and proper
context, filled with omissions and less than accurate information.” But
when asked to specify his concerns, he did not respond.
Zbiegniewicz’s decadelong
experience as a NYGS ward serves as a road map to how Article 81 fails
New Yorkers who are least able to protect themselves.
“Somebody’s Going to Come Help Me”
Zbiegniewicz’s
introduction to guardianship came as it does for thousands of others in
the city each year: through a call to the city Adult Protective Services
program by someone concerned about her well-being.
It was November 2008, and
Zbiegniewicz was struggling financially and emotionally. Her father had
died suddenly from a heart attack a year and a half earlier, leaving her
the family’s Maspeth, Queens, home — and, to her surprise, a reverse
mortgage. The outstanding debt was $266,532.95.
Zbiegniewicz had no job
and no way to pay. She had been dependent on her father all of her adult
life, the result of an early trauma: At 18, she was raped leaving the
subway on her way to work at Queens’ Welbilt Stove plant. Her world
became small, as her devastated parents shielded her. She never sought
therapy, never returned to work and rarely ventured beyond the comfort
of her block.
Now, with the house in
foreclosure, someone called the city to check on her. Adult Protective
Services soon sent a psychiatric nurse practitioner, who diagnosed
Zbiegniewicz with depression, anxiety and a dependent personality
disorder. In a court petition, the city noted that she relied on food
stamps and public assistance. With bills piling up, she had just $459.88
in her bank account.
So on a January day in
2010, to help Zbiegniewicz stave off eviction, a city lawyer walked into
a wood-paneled courtroom in the state Supreme Court building in Queens
and asked a judge to declare her an “incapacitated person” in need of a
guardian to manage her finances and housing.
Zbiegniewicz, who declined
to attend the hearing, initially welcomed the move. “I was in no
condition right then and there,” she said. “I was all alone, no
direction, no nothing. I thought, ‘OK, somebody’s going to come help me
get focused and leave.’”
The judge granted the
city’s request, setting in motion Zbiegniewicz’s spiraling journey into
New York’s overloaded guardianship system, which now contains 28,619
people statewide, more than 60% of whom live in New York City. In most
cases, a judge selects either a so-called lay guardian — family or
friends who volunteer — or a professional guardian, usually a lawyer,
which can be pricey. For the thousands of New Yorkers like Zbiegniewicz,
who have no family and too little money to be worth a professional
guardian’s time, a judge will choose from just under a dozen nonprofit
groups, depending on the circumstances. In cases where Adult Protective
Services is involved, that means one of three publicly-funded
organizations.
In Zbiegniewicz’s case,
the judge initially appointed the Jewish Association for Services for
the Aged. Its mandate was narrow: stopping her eviction.
The guardian negotiated
the sale of Zbiegniewicz’s family home, paid off the reverse mortgage
and secured $92,000 for her in the deal. Once the money was placed in a
special needs trust, JASA’s mission was complete. The judge then turned
to the list of professional guardians to help Zbiegniewicz find new
housing.
But the task was a
challenge. Zbiegniewicz insisted on keeping her five beloved schnauzers
and living with four longtime friends who’d supported her after her
father’s death. The arrangement made her a tough tenant to place, and by
July 2013 she’d faced eviction from two separate apartments where she
had withheld rent until repairs were made.
Before long, Zbiegniewicz’s professional guardian wanted out.
Like many private
attorneys in the system, she was working the case pro bono, and her
petition to be replaced reflected a larger strain in New York’s system,
which has long relied on such goodwill to handle guardianships of the
indigent.
Private lawyers have
“stopped taking cases in droves because they don’t want to spend the
time,” Arthur Diamond, the former supervising guardianship judge in
Nassau County, told state lawmakers in 2018. “And it can be an immense
amount of time being a guardian for somebody who has Alzheimer’s and
dementia, which many of our wards do.”
NYGS pitched itself
explicitly to the courts as a solution to this problem. A lawyer for the
group once wrote to a Queens judge in a letter obtained by ProPublica
that the company “hopes to fill a need in the court system” by taking
those cases in which a judge would otherwise have “a difficult time
finding a suitable guardian willing to act.”
In a July 2013 hearing,
Zbiegniewicz’s private guardian suggested NYGS take over her case
because “they seem to have a significant amount of resources.”
Supreme Court Justice Lee
Mayersohn OKed the switch, making NYGS the third guardian to handle
Zbiegniewicz’s case in three and a half years.
Exploding Caseloads, Little Vetting
The guardianship bill
state lawmakers passed in the early 1990s established the first training
requirements for guardians before they can serve — generally a daylong
class meant to ensure they have a baseline familiarity with Article 81’s
requirements. That’s less stringent than what the state requires of
prospective nail technicians, who must complete a 250-hour course and
pass tests. This low barrier to entry can allow a family member who
steps up to help a loved one in crisis quickly get in place. But
advocates say that New York’s permissiveness also enables exploitative
actors to enter the guardianship business.
At the time of NYGS’
founding, Blau was working as the director of judicial compliance at
another guardianship firm, according to his LinkedIn profile. The state
attorney general’s office investigated that group, Integral Guardianship
Services, during Blau’s tenure, and eventually accused it of abandoning
its most basic duties, including filing annual reports detailing wards’
finances. (Blau wasn’t named in the probe, which the group settled. The
firm shuttered its operations last spring.)
NYGS’ chief operating
officer — Blau’s older brother David — had been running an unrelated
e-commerce business, selling discounted travel coupons, according to
former employees.
Once certified, private
guardians are required to attest that they haven’t been found to have
violated any criminal, civil or professional rules. Nonprofits, however,
undergo no such vetting. In fact, they are not even required to provide
proof of their charitable status.
Had there been such a
requirement, the courts would have seen that NYGS is not registered as a
charity with the state attorney general’s office nor does it have
tax-exempt status from the Internal Revenue Service, both agencies
confirmed. Nevertheless, the company repeatedly represented itself as a
nonprofit in its court filings and promotional material as it took on
more and more cases, including Zbiegniewicz’s.
The distinction is
significant. Nonprofits are exempt from court rules that cap the number
of cases and the amount of compensation guardians can receive annually.
Such operations can be lucrative. One estimate commissioned by the state
attorney general in 2016 projected that a nonprofit guardian serving
400 low-and-no-fee wards could generate $1.2 million per year.
Sam Blau declined to
answer questions about the company’s tax status, but said in a statement
that “a large percentage of our cases are done completely Pro Bono,”
which “is certainly in line with our mission to help people of minimal
financial means.”
In pitching the firm to
the court, NYGS’ lawyer painted a picture of an organization with a
“cadre of knowledgeable and caring individuals” experienced in
guardianships who used “state of the art records management technology.”
In reality, the Blau
brothers operated out of a cramped second-floor office on Avenue J in
Midwood, Brooklyn, that was strewn with stacks of government forms, old
checkbooks and financial statements. For years, employee chats show, the
cremated remains of a ward sat in a plastic bag on the shelf of a
hallway closet, nestled in a plain white container the size of a shoe
box. The “state of the art” technology it used to manage its caseload
were actually Dropbox and Google Docs, former employees said.
NYGS’s business grew
rapidly by taking on dozens of new cases annually — a strategy that
former employees said was intended to maximize profit on the $450 per
month apiece it earned from most of its wards. But staffing didn’t keep
pace with volume, and workers realized that in order to do the job well,
the firm needed to take fewer cases and throw significant resources at
the ones it already had.
That didn’t happen.
In 2016, when the company
had 167 clients, it employed two full-time case managers, internal
records show. That was true the following year when the total caseload
jumped to 248 and remained the case the year after that, when NYGS was
responsible for nearly 300 wards. Two more employees were hired in 2018
to handle wards’ finances. Several studies, as well as states including
Virginia and Colorado, recommend a 20-client limit
to ensure proper care. New York, however, has no equivalent guidance,
and at one point NYGS had 83 wards per staffer, according to internal
records.
More recently, former
employees said, the company outsourced key jobs to workers in the
Philippines who were expected to address the complicated insurance,
banking and health care needs of vulnerable wards from 8,500 miles away.
One worker told ProPublica that she was so troubled by the lack of
resources and ceaseless calls — she was responsible for dozens of wards
every day — that she quit after six months.
For years, unless judges
specifically asked, they had no way to know whether nonprofits they
assigned actually had the bandwidth to take on new cases. It wasn’t
until last fall that the state court system, using a federal grant, created a database
so that judges and court staff can “better oversee the flow and nature
and structure of guardianship cases,” the courts’ spokesperson said.
Within NYGS, complaints
about the conditions, the lack of resources or a ward’s specific
problems were usually met with silence, said Billini, the former
director of case management. Sam Blau would just “stare into his
computer when you’d tell him something he didn’t want to hear,” she
said. “We called it the passive-aggressive stare.”
The former case manager,
as well as other workers, said this dynamic would play out time and
again after NYGS moved Zbiegniewicz into the upstairs apartment of
150-15 Yates Road, a two-family home in a dangerous section of Jamaica,
Queens. It was seven miles and a world away from the spacious Maspeth
house where she’d lived most of her life.
Blau did not respond to
questions about Billini’s account. In a general statement, he disputed
ProPublica’s reporting, which he claimed was based on “disgruntled
former employees who have a clear biased agenda.”
Bedbugs, Rats — No Questions Asked
Zbiegniewicz suspected something was amiss with her guardian from the start.
Shortly after moving into
the Yates Road apartment, she discovered bedbugs. She said she
complained to NYGS immediately, but it took three months before the
company sent pest control. The disruption caused her therapist to cancel
weekly sessions until an exterminator certified the insects were gone,
Zbiegniewicz said.
“I was tore up from the floor up,” she recalled of the bites.
In its filings to the
court, however, NYGS presented Zbiegniewicz as thriving. In language
that would repeat year after year, a company social worker who visited
the home wrote that “Ms. Zbiegniewicz is oriented to person, place, and
time,” described the frequency of her therapy sessions and the
medications she took, adding that she “enjoys gardening and taking care
of her dogs and roommates.”
To ensure the integrity of
such reports, the system includes a layer of protection for wards in
the form of court-appointed examiners. By law, these individuals —
typically lawyers or accountants — are tasked with reviewing guardians’
reports to “determine the condition and care” and finances of the ward,
as well as “the manner in which the guardian has carried out his or her
duties and exercised his or her powers.” In practice, the scrutiny can
be far from robust.
Today, there are just 157
examiners responsible for reviewing the reports of 17,411 New York City
wards, according to data from the court system. And their training can
be minimal. In Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island, this includes viewing
a set of instructional DVDs that were recorded 12 years ago.
Like the cost of the guardianship itself, the price for these examinations is borne by the ward.
Zbiegniewicz paid a few
hundred dollars each year for an examiner’s reviews. But her records
show these examiners did not interrogate spending that indicated
potential housing problems.
In 2014, for example,
Zbiegniewicz’s account listed four separate disbursements — totaling
$1,251 — for extermination, laundry and cleaning services, all
explicitly labeled as bedbug remedies. Yet when the examiner asked
whether the housing was “best suited” to Zbiegniewicz’s needs, NYGS said
it was “appropriate.” There’s no indication in the file that the
examiner at the time, Paul Guttenberg, pressed any further or followed
up on the extermination expenses. Guttenberg, who declined to be
interviewed and didn’t respond to emailed questions, approved NYGS’
report.
The subsequent examiner of
Zbiegniewicz’s case, Janet Brown, was similarly uncritical. Court data
show she carried a significant caseload. Zbiegniewicz was just one of 44
new cases Brown picked up in 2015 alone — a pace that would continue
throughout the guardianship. Each year, after reconciling the
financials, she signed off on NYGS’ reports, including those that showed
Zbiegniewicz paying to address more problems a landlord would typically
be expected to cover: $180 for electrical work in January 2018, then
$30 more for an electric stove that May and $50 for a heater in
December.
That year, when Brown
asked whether Zbiegniewicz’s apartment was “best suited to her current
needs,” an NYGS employee responded, “It is not the ideal placement, but
currently it is the best & only placement” for her.
The employee provided no
further explanation in the filing, and there is no indication in the
court record that Brown asked for one.
Meanwhile, the conditions
in the apartment steadily worsened, according to emails, court filings
and interviews with four other people who spent time there.
“Now the rats are eating
the kitchen chairs,” Zbiegniewicz wrote to NYGS in a March 2019 email.
“By the time I leave I will not have anything to take.”
That year, the
guardianship reported spending $280 of Zbiegniewicz’s money for “storage
containers and pest Control,” as well as “reimbursement for
Extermination and Bathroom Repair.”
There is no indication in
the court records that Brown even examined these 2019 expenses. While
Article 81 requires guardians to file wards’ annual accounts by May of
the following year, there is no such deadline for examiners.
Zbiegniewicz’s file is still missing reviews for four years of her
guardianship.
In an interview, Brown
said that her job was to “make sure the dollar amounts balance out” and
that funds were not “being misused.” By those standards, there were no
disbursements in the annual reports that “raised an eyebrow,” she said.
She said she wasn’t aware of the chronic heating problems, the collapsed
roof or the pest infestations in the Yates Road apartment, despite the
expenditures for extermination and various capital improvements in the
reports she reviewed.
“I would have had no way
of knowing that unless someone directly reached out to me and said,
‘Hey, this is a problem,’” she said.
Brown didn’t respond when asked why she didn’t file her reviews for 2019 through 2022.
Zbiegniewicz said that for
years she had no idea that she could take her complaints to the
examiner. When she finally did phone, she said, Brown conferenced in a
NYGS employee and left the call.
Brown, who is no longer an
examiner, said she didn’t recall that conversation, but that she
remembered Zbiegniewicz was vocal about her desire to be released from
the guardianship. Brown said that she believed she discussed that with
someone at NYGS but she couldn’t recall with whom or what was said.
“I do genuinely care,” she said, “even if you don’t think so.”
Experts said the failure
to conduct face-to-face check-ins could hide horrific situations.
Judicial leaders, they said, can and should bolster examinations with
home visits. For example, in Davidson County, Tennessee, which includes
Nashville, social services workers visit wards, review their medical
records and interview guardians and their doctors.
“You’ve got to visit the
person,” said Booth Glen, the former judge who helped write Article 81.
“Paper is not enough when human lives are at stake.”
With Judges, “Things Just Get Locked In”
Examiners are the main check on guardians, but judges also review examiners’ reports before signing off.
Zbiegniewicz believed that
if Mayersohn understood how dire her living conditions were, he would
require NYGS to fix the situation. The son of a state assemblymember, he
started his career as a legislative aide and practiced law for nearly
two decades, focusing on trusts and estates, among other civil matters,
before being elected to the bench in 2004.
What Zbiegniewicz didn’t
know was how long it could take for information to get to the judge —
and how long it could take him to review it. She is just one of 1,566
open guardianship cases currently on the judge’s docket, according to
court data. Such a robust caseload, coupled with too few examiners, can
add years to the oversight process, creating dangerous gaps in
information in cases like Zbiegniewicz’s.
For example, in the spring
of 2018, NYGS submitted its guardianship report for the prior year, as
required by law. The paperwork contained numerous indications that
something was wrong at Yates Road. Notably, no rent payments were listed
for the apartment and the company acknowledged for the first time that
the house was “not the ideal placement” for Zbiegniewicz.
But a full year passed
before the examiner filed her review with the court, where it was
eventually checked by clerks and then passed to Mayersohn for approval.
In all, the entire process took more than two years. None of the parties
raised alarms over, or even noted, the missing rent payments.
Had they dug deeper, they
would have found that Yates Road had gone through a foreclosure and been
sold to a bank that was moving to evict Zbiegniewicz and her friends.
It’s unclear who actually owned the house when NYGS moved her there; the
deed had changed hands multiple times in quick succession. During
Zbiegniewicz’s first two years in the house, the guardian had sent
$32,000 of its ward’s money to a firm run by a Queens entrepreneur who
was later convicted of real estate fraud in an unrelated case. When the
eviction notice arrived, NYGS stopped paying the rent but appeared to do
little else.
“Phone calls to the
guardian in an attempt to work out some sort of reasonable solution have
failed since the guardian has refused to respond to any call,” an
attorney for the new landlord wrote in a December 2017 court filing. The
company eventually hired a lawyer to respond to the landlord-tenant
action.
For more than two years,
while the official reports on Zbiegniewicz’s welfare crawled through the
court system, NYGS kept her in the home.
During that time, she
endured all manner of horrendous living conditions. According to her
emails to NYGS, she went long stretches without heat and rats ate holes
through her clothes. When the apartment lost power, she and her
roommates had to jury-rig the breaker box with a popsicle stick to feed
electricity upstairs.
“You have to get in
contact with someone,” she wrote to NYGS on Jan. 20, 2018, when her
refrigerator lost power. “We are running extension cord from the
basement to up stairs. We are hungry did not eat yesterday.”
When NYGS failed to act,
Zbiegniewicz and her roommates complained to the city, triggering visits
from building inspectors, who documented no running hot water and
failure to supply adequate heat. That prompted the Department of Housing
Preservation and Development to sue the new owner, who agreed to pay
fines to settle the lawsuit.
It’s not clear just how
much Mayersohn knew about these cases. The siloed nature of New York’s
sprawling courts can leave guardianship judges in the dark about
significant developments elsewhere in the legal system. That makes the
guardian's report — and the examiner's review — even more critical for
guardianship judges. But neither NYGS nor Zbiegniewicz’s examiner
mentioned the escalating legal actions in their reports.
Mayersohn declined to be
interviewed, saying judicial ethics opinions barred him from commenting
on “any pending case in any jurisdiction,” and he didn't respond to
detailed written questions about his handling of Zbiegniewicz’s case.
Within NYGS, staffers were
growing increasingly concerned for Zbiegniewicz’s well-being and passed
complaints along to David and Sam Blau, said Billini, the firm’s former
case manager. A nurse practitioner for the company confirmed the
deplorable conditions on her quarterly visits to the house and reported
back to NYGS.
“Client remains angry and
frustrated over her living conditions — roaches, mice and rats,” the
nurse wrote in notes submitted to the guardianship in February 2019.
“There is mold — breathing unhealthy. Would like things to move along.”
And yet, nothing changed, Zbiegniewicz said. (The Blaus did not respond to requests for comment on these claims.)
So in 2019, she started
calling Mayersohn’s chambers. She phoned so frequently, she said, that
the judge’s secretary knew her case number by heart. But the judge never
talked to her when she called, she said. Like the examiner, the
secretary sent Zbiegniewicz’s complaints back to the guardianship.
"Once a guardian is
appointed, the court’s tendency is to just work with the guardian,” said
Joe Rosenberg, who co-directs the CUNY School of Law’s Disability and
Aging Justice Clinic. “I think it’s tough to get out of that cycle. And
perhaps that’s in part because it’s hard to find another guardian.
Things just get locked in.”
The demand for guardians
is particularly great among elderly New Yorkers “who are alone, with no
one to help, and few or no resources,” the Vera Institute of Justice, a
legal reform nonprofit, reported in 2018.
And so groups like NYGS fulfill the court’s “greatest need,” said
acting state Supreme Court Justice Charles Troia during a panel
discussion on guardianships in 2021. “We need agencies that are willing
to help those that truly have nothing.”
Other judges, the courts’
spokesperson said, have advocated for structural changes, including
replacing nonprofits with “a statewide, state-supported public guardian
program for indigent persons.”
But for now, without such an agency to serve poor wards with considerable needs, judges have few other options.
Zbiegniewicz was better
able to advocate for herself than wards who have severe health problems,
but even she worried that her persistent complaints may have hurt her
cause. She said she got the feeling that the judge and lawyers and court
staff believed she was unstable and therefore easy to dismiss. “It used
to drive me up a wall,” she said of the Article 81 designation attached
to her name. “That is a badge saying that I'm cuckoo.”
“This Is My Life and I Want It Back”
After years of turmoil,
David Blau notified the court in May 2019 that he had negotiated a
resolution to Zbiegniewicz’s five-year-plus housing crisis: The bank
would pay her $5,000 to leave Yates Road and NYGS would, in turn, place
her in an assisted living facility.
Zbiegniewicz “suffers
from a debilitating anxiety disorder and requires assistance with her
finances,” Blau asserted in a court petition. The conditions, he argued,
necessitated a higher level of care. Billini and other staffers inside
NYGS disagreed. Zbiegniewicz and her court-appointed attorney did too.
In a June 2019 filing
opposing David Blau’s petition, the attorney informed the court that
Zbiegniewcz had already moved out of Yates Road on her own. That month
she’d married her longtime friend Leonard Hubbard, and the couple were
living together in a city shelter.
Nevertheless, Mayersohn
ordered Zbiegniewicz to find proper housing and ordered NYGS to
“support” her in that endeavor. But again, Zbiegniewicz said, the
company failed her. She needed her financial records to apply for
subsidized housing, but she said NYGS responded slowly to her requests
or not at all. She managed to get the records on her own and worked with
a social worker at the shelter to secure a new home, she said.
“I need to be in control
of my own life and I can’t wait on you to do something, to give me
paperwork, to give me this, or anything,” she told David Blau in an Oct.
29, 2020, voicemail. “This is my life and I want it back. Thank you.”
Zbiegniewicz said she
never heard back after leaving that message. And because the pandemic
shuttered the courts, there were no appearances in her case for more
than two years. She was in legal limbo, without any kind of oversight.
“These people do not care about you,” Zbiegniewicz said.
Eventually, she secured a
one-bedroom apartment for herself, Hubbard and their new dog, Bogart,
in a Long Island City building overlooking the East River for $905 a
month. With a housing voucher and public benefits covering two-thirds of
the rent, it’s far cheaper than the $1,350 she shelled out each month
to live on Yates Road. Ironically, because of an oversight by NYGS, she
was able to access her bank account to help pay rent.
Mayersohn finally
released Zbiegniewicz from the guardianship in February 2022. In NYGS’
final report, the company disclosed taking $12,551 to cover “unpaid
monthly compensation” for the nearly two and a half years she had
effectively lived outside the guardianship. The lump sum payment brought
the balance of Zbiegniewicz’s accounts to zero.
To date, nobody involved
in her case — from NYGS to the examiners who approved the company’s
reports — has been held to account. But there is still time for the
judge to consider their actions.
Because NYGS failed to
file the required paperwork to settle Zbiegniewicz’s account, her case
technically remains open. A lawyer for NYGS finally filed that motion in
January — two days after ProPublica first contacted the organization
for comment on this story. The paperwork now awaits Mayersohn’s
signature.
In January, Zbiegniewicz sent a letter to Mayersohn, describing the “injustice and mistreatment” she said she’d endured.
“All I would like is to
be heard and for New York Guardianship Services to be held accountable
for what they did and did not do for me,” she wrote.
Mayersohn’s secretary
confirmed receipt on Jan. 31 but cautioned that, due to a significant
backlog, it would take time to resolve her guardianship.
Full Article & Source:
Bedbugs, Rats and No Heat: How One Woman Endured a Decade of Neglect in New York’s Guardianship System
