When everything seems to go horribly wrong, where does one turn to?

In the final years of her life, my mother, who suffered from dementia, fell victim to financial abuse by the very nursing home caregivers who we had trusted to keep her safe and comfortable. The nursing facility in New Jersey put her in touch with a local unethical attorney who manipulated her and bilked her out of hundreds of thousands of dollars and a large portion of her estate. He later joined forces with another attorney, in Morristown, NJ. We fought hard to stop them, but they had powerful connections. My petition for legal guardianship in Morris County probate Court, as her only family went nowhere, and my family was unsure where to turn when the system is so irreparably broken. The last few years of my mother’s life were fraught with watching the attorneys and judges separate her completely from her family, until they fought for and won, legal guardianship over her, only 22 days before her death. She died all alone, isolated in the nursing home, having fallen from her bed without rails, alone and completely isolated from her family. We had been prevented from seeing her for the last 3 years of her life.

May 14th marks another painful anniversary for our family. Six years ago that very day, my husband was suddenly fired from a long-time Vice President position with a family-owned medical company in Ramsey, NJ because of an untrue and slanderous article, obviously written with malicious intent. This article appeared in a small local newspaper, naming both of us (and ALL the names of the universities we attended and companies where we worked at) with a headline making it go viral in New Jersey. Ironically the newspaper was in the town next to one of the unethical lawyer’s offices and later this newspaper was forced to retract the article. But the damage had been done and it took a costly defamation attorney to have the article taken down from Google and other internet search engines and much later the pdfs off of my mother’s spiteful attorneys’ websites displayed as their marketing collateral. Reporting them to the NJ Ethics Board proved useless too.

That same day all of my bank accounts (including those I had with my 3 children) were wiped clean of all money because Judge placed a judgement against me for US savings bonds that were given to me by my mother over a period of 30 years as gifts. The timing of the draining of the accounts was terrible and the embarrassment and shock of my husband losing a job for the first time ever in his life, for the wrong reason was just crushing to our family. Especially after not getting guardianship in the trial, which was what I had initially set out to do when my mother’s mental capacity was rapidly failing. Not to mention the whispers and gossip by the people who weren’t aware of the sacrifices we had made over the years for my mom who had lived with us for 4 years prior. However by some miracle, we lived through it and my husband found a new job and his stellar reputation in the pharmaceutical industry prevailed and was not compromised, as the lawyers had hoped. But when May 14th rolls around every spring…..it’s a raw and painful memory to remember. I hope my story can help other innocent people avoid being dragged into a terrible situation like what happened to us. Guardianship abuse is becoming g rampant. Not just in NJ but all over the country, as more stories of waste, exploitation and abuse occur more and more in our broken adult guardianship and probate system