“Judy Morrison said trouble began days after her mom died in 2016. That’s when her father found more than $600,000 missing from her mother’s bank account.”
The missing money came from years of work on the family’s farm. It was supposed to be passed to her father. ,However the money had gone to her half-sister’s bank account. As reported by Iowa Public Radio’s article “Elder Abuse Remains A Legal Challenge in Iowa,” it took months to figure it all out.
Morrison accuses her sister of forging documents and lying to their mother—who spoke little English—to get the money. However, it took nearly three years before the sister was charged with first degree theft for taking the money without authorization. It was a long, complex paper trail with a detective who kept putting her off, telling her that he had homicides and human trafficking to deal with.
Morrison had to fight tooth and nail the whole way. That doesn’t surprise Chantelle Smith, an assistant attorney general in Des Moines, who has worked on elder abuse cases for almost twenty years. She sees cases like this all the time, she said. They are challenging and time intensive for law enforcement, especially in rural areas. If there are only two officers and two detectives, they may not have the time to investigate an elder abuse case.
The National Council on Aging reports that one in ten adults over age 60 has experienced some form of abuse, whether it is financial, physical, or emotional. However, less than 5 percent of these cases actually reaches litigation after a complaint is made, according to a University of Iowa report. Numbers from the Department of Human Services have risen to nearly 5,300 for adults over 60, compared to 860 just five years ago.
The state attorney general’s office just completed a three-year program funded by a grant from the U.S. Department of Justice to combat elder abuse. 600 law enforcement agents, doctors, victim services providers and other professionals were trained on how to identify and investigate elder abuse.
The grant was also used to create a community response team, which puts people from different professions together for regular meetings on how to address these issues. The grant was also used to pilot a “Later in Life” program in Dallas County that trains specialists to find and provide services to victims over age 50.
Polk County, the most highly populated in Iowa, is the only county with a unit dedicated to elder and dependent adult abuse.
The executive director of the Crisis Intervention and Advocacy Center in Adel, Iowa, said that in the past 17 months, nearly 400 people have been helped in 12 mostly rural counties. The center has three elder abuse specialists, who help victims in moving out of abuser’s homes, get them to appointments and help them file police reports, if they wish to do so. Few victims are willing to file a police report, but in nearly all cases, the abuser is a family member. They are fearful of retaliation, and of getting family members in trouble with the law.
The program is in limbo, since the federal grant ended in September and the agency is waiting for news about an extension.
Reference: Iowa Public Radio (November 19, 2019) “Elder Abuse Remains A Legal Challenge in Iowa”
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