PARIS – The state has assumed temporary guardianship of an elderly woman after a caseworker found her living in deplorable conditions and possibly being exploited by a man she had known for only a short time, according to a Maine Department of Health and Human Services report.
The 93-year-old woman was in a house that the town bought in July for $58,000. The town intends to raze it and use the site for more municipal parking.
Department of Health and Human Services spokesman Mike Norton said the woman is now in an assisted-living facility. The department is petitioning the Oxford County Probate Court for permanent guardianship based on what officials claim is the woman’s inability to care for herself. A hearing is scheduled Nov. 9.
The woman has one sister in Delaware living in a nursing home, and no other family, according to the department.
The department’s court petition describes the findings of a caseworker for the Office of Elder Services who visited the woman three times in September and found William Smith, 37, of Danbury, Conn., taking care of her and living in one of her homes.
Besides the Paris home she sold to the town, and a mobile home in Oxford she bought to move into, the woman owned a house in Norway and a mobile home in West Paris.
The department found that Smith, who has a criminal record, had been written into the woman’s will to receive all her assets and had taken the woman to a lawyer Aug. 31 to assume power of attorney for her. He was living in her Norway house but not paying rent, and was also listed on the deed of her new $68,000 mobile home in Oxford.
These legal actions were done with the consent of the woman, according to the report.
After the department looked into the woman’s finances, it was discovered that one of her bank accounts was overdrawn by $400 and the other contained $15, the report said. The woman receives $868 a month in Social Security.
Norton said that the department investigated Smith’s background and found he was convicted of risking injury to a minor in 1998 in Connecticut, a charge Norton said had been reduced from a more serious sex charge and which does not require registration in a public sex offender database. A Connecticut State Police spokeswoman confirmed this conviction.
Smith also was convicted of animal cruelty in 1998 in Connecticut, according to Norton.
A knock at the door of the house where Smith lives in Norway went unanswered Wednesday morning.
The caseworker wrote in her report that when she visited the woman at her Paris home, she found the 93-year-old had short- and long-term memory loss and was disoriented.
“She was pleasantly confused and could not tell me even what town she currently lived in,” the caseworker wrote in the report. “She was dressed in dirty clothes that smelled of urine, her home is in condemnable conditions with feces and urine all over her furnishings, and piles of garbage, filth and clutter on everything in the home.”
Four or five dogs and several indoor cats were living with the woman, the caseworker wrote.
Town Manager Sharon Jackson said the town signed a purchase agreement in October 2004 for the woman’s home, contingent on voters approving the sale at town meeting in July.
After townspeople voted to buy the property, Jackson said she met with the woman, the town attorney, a real estate agent and a friend of the woman’s to complete the purchase of the home.
The friend was contacted Wednesday, but did not wish to comment on the situation.
Jackson said that when she met the woman, “She didn’t give any indication of there being anything wrong with her. Her main reason for selling the house was so she could buy some place in the country where she could have plenty of room for her animals.”
An animal control officer has handled the animals, Jackson said.
The Department of Human Services has asked the Probate Court to revoke Smith’s power of attorney – over the woman’s objections. According to the report, the woman told a lawyer, whose office managed a $100,000 to $200,000 car accident settlement for her, that she wanted Smith to continue assisting her. The woman also asked another lawyer to make Smith executor of her will. She was adamant that she had no one else to help her, the caseworker wrote.
According to the court petition, the department’s plan is to move the woman into her new Oxford mobile home and manage her finances and health care.
“The goal is to have the least restrictive option,” Norton said.
Norton said that the department receives about 3,000 adult case referrals a year and investigates about two-thirds. In such cases last year, roughly 20 percent involved financial exploitation, he said.
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