"Emmett Till's mother sent photographs of her brutalized son around the world." 

                                                          - Reynolds and Kendi, Stamped

“No bond is more precious than that between parent and child,
and none should be more zealously protected by the law.”

                                                   - Carson v. Elrod, US Court of Appeals, Fourth Circuit  

Cleveland, OH, 23 Jan '06  –  Genevieve Rowan's daughter, two sons and nephew write her absentee guardian, Ronald L. McLaughlin of Lakewood, Ohio, requesting he grant Genevieve’s wish to be released from the back-ward of a distant nursing home over the county line, and return to Cleveland, her hometown, where many in her family live. True to an old Irish custom, by which the youngest sibling takes cares of the aging parent, her younger son is her only family willing to live with her.

McLaughlin has played very dirty from the day, five years earlier, he bulldozed his way into her life, as Exhibits B and C begin to show. (Exhibits are available from hayesrowan@gmail.com.) Sill, her family is not prepared for what he is about to do to derail Genevieve's last hope. 

9 Feb  -  Her younger son, travelling three hours on two buses to the nursing home, is stopped short in the doorway to his mother's room:  She has a new roommate, one who fills the day by venting her fury in long tattoos of word salad, syllablesstrungtogethermeaninglessly, hissed out tirelessly, on and on and on.

Genevieve 's head is buried in her hands.

At the sound of her son’s voice, she raises her head slowly, as though struggling with an unbearable weight. Her eyes register terror as they dart at the thin curtain separating her and the roommate. She can summon few words during their visit. 

The facility had previously installed sensors on her bed frame to summon orderlies if she tries to leave the room. A note found in her chart states she has no need for them. Other devices have been placed on her mattress. They keen harshly for no apparent reason - sometimes if Genevieve just turns her head. For ten months, McLaughlin, (“RM,”) has ignored the son’s written requests to get the alarms removed.

12 – 20 Feb - Each time her son Hayes calls he can hear the roommate's rasped psychobabble in the background. Six times he and his brother entreat RM or the facility’s director to stop the abuse. Six times they are ignored. (Exhibits M and N are representative.)

24 Feb – Having given the facility two days’ notice in advance of his visit, (an illegal condition the nursing home and RM are imposing,) her younger son arrives to find RN Toni Smartt at his mother’s bedside. He knocks lightly on the open door. There is a brief pause. 

“Genevieve,” Nurse Smartt taunts, “is this your mother, or your daughter?”

Genevieve ignores the jibe. “This is my son,” she says timidly. She is on her bed, rigid with tension, straight as a board.

Unable to provoke a scene, (a skill some of the nurse's co-workers had honed,) she leaves the room. The roommate starts her babbled tirade, slowly upping the volume and tempo - the effect is not unlike a locomotive climbing a steep grade, pistons thrashing wildly. The son steps around the curtain, asks her to be quiet please. She glares at him with a rage not easily forgotten but goes silent.

Genevieve 's older son, Rudd, (from eastern NY,) is in town. He tells his brother he couldn't keep their mother awake the day before when he took her outdoors, so overwhelmed and exhausted is she. (POWs call her condition TMB, Total Mental Breakdown.) Rudd says he talked with the director, the late Thomas Wyszynski, about a room change. To no avail, (Exh O.) 

The younger son counts four empty beds in quiet, double rooms, walking to the director’s office.

Why, he asks, can't his mother move into one of those? 

“It wouldn’t be a good mix,” the director replies glibly. 

Says he doesn't know when the roommate can be moved.

A federal survey indicated he had more than 30 empty beds.

"Do you still want to visit more often now?” he asks, and his expression clouds with anger as the son says yes, that he has no intention of ignoring the abuse and abandoning his mother.

The director begins to frame another question, hesitates in an affected way, feigns a careful phrasing, and re-phrasing, until it seems he is alluding to euthanasia. The son leaves the room, quickly.

Called to testify in a sham hearing before Cuyahoga County chief probate judge, John J. Donnelly Sr., in 2004, the director pronounced his name, with a sneer, "Wiz-noose-ski." 

An online search suggests he died months after the son filed suit against him and the owners of the nursing home. 

Walking back to his mother’s room, the son has to pass a nurses’ station where Denise Caldwell, the social worker, has stationed herself. For the occasion perhaps. For five years she has enforced RM’s every directive with the coldness of a Nurse Ratched. (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.) Their eyes lock. She smirks, averts her eyes, pretends to read something on her clipboard, smug satisfaction lingering on her face.

An aide tells the son the roommate has been elsewhere in the building for years.

Late in the afternoon Genevieve is nauseous and is transported to Geneva Memorial.

25 Feb – Subdued, tremulous, she tells her younger son she doesn't understand why she now has no memory of her husband of 25 years, the anchor of her storm-tossed life. Before this month of torment - (torture would be more accurate) - she spoke of him with good recall and insight. The son prompts her with questions; that helps her reel in some scattered memories.

She has no recall, whatsoever, of the roommate, a Margaret Tankovitch.

Amnesia is a known response to severe trauma.

The son asks Dr. Magdi Rizk, a psychiatrist respected in certain of Cleveland’s legal circles, to document Genevieve’s condition and advocate against her being sent back to the facility, Madison Health Care. He is quite ill, though, and suggests a colleague, who declines, and makes no report of the matter, in violation of Ohio law, (§ 5101 (A)(6)(ii,) which requires doctors, social workers, clergy, police and other professionals to report elder abuse. 

27 Feb – RM, whose key role in all this is examined below, refuses to acknowledge anything is wrong. Ignores the abuse entirely. The son reports it to Geneva Memorial's administrator, and the Long-Term-Care Ombuds, Adult Protective Services of Lake and Cuyahoga Counties, and a Madison Township police lieutenant. (Exhibit P is representative.) Not one does anything to help. 

MacArthur Fellow and former Justice Department attorney Marie Connolly says elder abuse is an epidemic - and the nation is wearing earplugs. 

A spokesperson for Adult Protection in Cuyahoga told the son two years earlier that her agency had no authority when abuse is committed in a nursing home. Told him to try the Ombudsman. He goes there again, having been there twice the previous 10 years. The Ombuds shrugs her shoulders, says it won't be long.

2 Mar – Learning of the son's efforts to spare his mother further harm, RM fires off an email full of invective. (Exhibit A.) Says the son's reports are “bogus complaints, outrageous demands, harassment.” And ups the offensive: suspends all communication between mother and son. Threatens it may be permanent. (Exh. A, ¶3, line 6.) The local appellate court, in another case, called what he is doing, “the family law equivalent of the death penalty." [46]

2 Mar - Genevieve is sent back to the nursing home,[48] and she, not the roommate, is moved to a different room, so now she has no phone. (It had taken RM three years to get her a landline.) She is completely alone now, completely cut off. At a time when she needs family desperately.

Then RM authorizes "a procedure." Has the gall to imply that it is "non-invasive.’ (Exh A, ¶1.) Few operations, in fact, are as profoundly invasive. It is his M.O: lying, brazenly. With impunity.) He ignores the son’s written plea for alternative treatment.

Days after, Genevieve is in the ICU in pain so severe she is given Fentanyl, and Morphine, and she is struggling to breathe, she is suffocating.   (Continued below.)

Preface to the report to Governor Mike DeWine when he headed Ohio Attorney Generals office:

                In 2016 Eyal Press investigated a Florida prison where inmates with PTSD were tortured to death or driven to suicide by guards. His article, published in The New Yorker, examines the culture of silence surrounding the abuses.

Silence still prevails over what Genevieve endured, under color of law, until she could bear no more, as RM and Judge Donnelly, ignoring their protective mandates, looked on. The lack of political will at county and state levels to bring this case to justice is a telling commentary on democracy in America. And so, a petition.

Yes, problems in the courts go back a ways. To Old Testament days, when Daniel saved Susanna's life - defended her from judges of the sort who destroyed Genevieve's life; judges of the same cloth as the Garsons of Brooklyn (NY) Family Court, successfully prosecuted months after the Trade Towers fell. Someday if God’s in heaven they will get what they deserve for what they did to Genevieve Mary Rowan, nee Gallagher-O'Neill, Catholic college graduate, newspaper reporter, candidate for the Ohio senate, avid reader, mother of three, survivor of child abuse for which the Catholic church is too well known.) 

Advocate Mike Bright, (Arc of the United States,) has testified that improper confinement in a nursing home is tantamount to imprisonment. Some call it human trafficking -- keeping the federal dollars rolling in while mercilessly cutting corners on care. And taxpayers unknowingly foot the bill for this backwater criminality, as Brandman describes in Damned If You Do.

If you've walked through the day room of a nursing home recently, you may have wondered if you'd somehow time-travelled to an addicts' shooting gallery: most of the residents are nodding out, or staring vacantly. It's called chemical restraint - using powerful and sometimes deadly anti-psychotic drugs to keep residents quiet. It's illegal, but enforcement is nil, due to the inducements, (read, bribes,) handed out by nursing home lobbyists -- causing Brent Larkin, a seasoned editor at Cleveland’s daily, to write, "The lobby hasn't earned the affection of the legislature, it has bought it." [36] (Was he comparing the statehouse to a brothel?)

During his guardianship over Genevieve, McLaughlin shared an office with his mentor, Anthony C. Sinagra, former Ohio senator, now a felon, for having bilked a school district for a third of a million dollars, (prosecuted when federal agents tilted at the corruption riddling Cuyahoga County, circa 2011.)

RM now shares the office with attorney Kevin Butler, who may be related to the Presbyterian minister of the same surname whose church is cheek by jowl to the law office. Rev. James Butler is a trustee of Barton Foundation and Senior Center, and on the board of 'LSC Corporation' which runs several low-income senior housing complexes in Northeast Ohio. The Reverend, when briefed on what RM did to Genevieve, stopped returning phone calls.

* * * * * *     

The Last Report

(Edited, slightly for clarity, as the disabling effects of trauma recede.)

“A parent's interest in the companionship of his or her children rises to a constitutionally secured right, given the centrality of family life as the focus for personal meaning and responsibility.”

                                                   – Stanley v Illinois,

                                                          US Supreme Court

From: hayes rowan <hayesrowan@gmail.com>
Date: Wed, Aug 17, 2016 at 6:56 PM
Subject: Office of the Ohio Attorney General -- Mmes. Mertz and Farrell,
To: <mary.mertz@ohioattorneygeneral.gov>
Cc: <paula.farrell@ohioattorneygeneral.gov>

Mike DeWine, Ohio Attorney General,

Attorney General DeWine, I trust this finds you well.

May this serve to inform you of court transcripts, (Cuyahoga County Probate Case 2000 GRD 951350,) for the hearings of 20 Dec 2004 and 20 June ’05, that can help document the criminal acts that the guardianship lawyer Ronald L. McLaughlin committed to conceal his part in the protracted and eventually deadly abuse his ward Genevieve Gallagher-Rowan suffered in a Lake County nursing home.

Like his mentor Tony Sinagra, Sr., the felonious state senator now a lobbyist in Columbus, RM is a propagandist, a flack, with an agenda that does not include the welfare of those he is sworn to protect - seniors and people with disability. His affidavits and polemic letters, (Exhibit A is a prime example,) and his answers to your investigators, (Case M2 08 0079,] are exercises in perjury and record tampering by which he tried to divert attention from his gross maltreatment of a survivor of childhood trauma, and a bright and spirited woman nonetheless.

 Her medical record describes my mother as “Coherent, articulate, alert, intelligent – no indications of serious mental illness.” (Exhs. D, E, F.)

In recorded conversations she described the back ward in which RM kept her confined half a decade as “inhumane” and “torturous.” She wasn’t exaggerating. 

 “She never lost her thirst for justice and debate,” my brother said at her funeral - “her irrepressible love of word and song, her knowing glance.” 

This report does not convey how deeply she felt RM’s malice.

The paper trail shows that the probate court, though fully informed of his treatment of Genevieve, still favors him with guardianship appointments, and quite willfully ignores the evidence [5] that his wrongful actions caused Genevieve psychological and physical pain that was severe, long-lasting, and preventable – and that his crimes were often premeditated.

Requesting that you bring this matter to the grand jury after examining the complete paper trail, which includes correspondence between RM and Genevieve ’s family; affidavits; photographs; letters; recorded conversations between Genevieve and nursing home staff and her younger son. Examined in their totality these documents are far more revealing than the court file. 

 Requesting, too, that you order the transcripts produced before 20 December 2016, for statutory reasons explained below - and view them in light of this report. 

 [Neither the governor nor Cuyahoga's prosecutor, (he too received this report,) acted to preserve the transcripts. Which appears to contravene state law on evidence tampering.] 

*****

 The American Bar Association acknowledges that they don’t know how many guardians abuse their wards. [7]

 The ABA affirms on paper that probate courts are mandated to supervise guardians and are responsible for their actions. [8] 

 Cuyahoga's probate court is not reining McLaughlin in, violating the ABA’s guidelines and Ohio’s Superior Guardian statute, [9,] enacted to protect the community’s most vulnerable. That lapse leaves the wards assigned him, and the court’s other wards, at a higher risk for neglect and abuse. 

 Exhibit A, RM's letter of 2 Mar 2006, shows his appetite for dishing out abuse. It is the measure of the man that he would write a letter of such hostility while his ward was suffering nightmarish abuse -- which he easily could have stopped, and by law was required to -- abuse Genevieve did not long survive. The deceits in his letter are examined in footnote 47.

 Exhibit B, a letter he wrote with poisoned pen on 21 May ‘01 – examined alongside the affidavit of Madison police sergeant William Barson (Exh. C) - reveals, too, the extent of his calculated dishonesty: he wrote it weeks after the son informed Cuyahoga's chief probate judge John J. Donnelly that the attorney was making serious threats, (recounted below,) against Genevieve and the son, her only advocate.

The chronology is revealing:  RM threatened the son in December, 2000. In March of '01, after recovering from the nervous breakdown the intimidation caused him, the son reported it to Donnelly.  Two months on, in May, RM fired off the character assassination, (Exh B,) copied it to the court and to Rudd, and suspended Genevieve’s right to see Hayes, (her only visitor, with rare exceptions.)

The sergeant's affidavit shows RM's letter for what it is: callous, criminal behavior, committed under color of law.

Soon after RM wrested control of Genevieve ’s guardianship in December of 2000, Ohio Governor Bob Taft promised to “prosecute those who abuse, neglect, or murder” the disabled. [10] Taft convened a task force, which found that judges and prosecutors and police needed extensive "re-training.” [11] 

Among the problems the panel uncovered were patterns of regulatory failure reflecting widespread corruption in the state health department, which licenses facilities. [12] 

The panel's recommendations were expected to meet with tough opposition from nursing home lobbyists, who finance themselves by robbing those trapped in their nursing homes. (Special Agent Rick Madison, then with the Cleveland office’s Public Corruption Squad, tells of a nursing home that sued him when he tried to move family to another facility. He did not want to be quoted – and there's the tip of the iceberg to another culture of silence.)

Taft's panel's findings serve as the backdrop for RM’s criminal behavior, and the court’s complicity in it.

Due to events stemming from RM's 21 May ‘01 character assassination, (Exh B,) Genevieve and her younger son did not see each other for two and a half years. [13] It is not known if anyone visited her during that time. The son then found her sickened by chemical restraint, which is vile to endure, and illegal, [14.] And it can be fatal. [15]  

And she was being force-fed, through a feeding tube. She had resorted to a hunger strike, (not her first,) to protest her mistreatment. The tube caused her repeated, life-threatening infections at the insertion site; and pneumonia, from inhaling her vomit when aides left her prone on the bed during feeding. (Both her sons would find she could still eat and drink.)

 Her lips were caked with dried mucus and bile. She wistfully asked for food and water; and she said, correctly, she had no need for the feeding tube. 

 The window in her room was blocked by venetian blinds an employee had turned down and sealed behind a crude barrier of plastic and duct-tape. Her wall clock was gone. Her cassette player was broken. It was a portrait of abandonment bearing RM’s signature. 

 The requested transcripts corroborate other documents, readily available, showing that the attorney spoke the more pointed of his threats during a brief phone call on the eve of a watershed hearing before Judge Donnelly on 7 December 2000 - Genevieve’s birthday, as the judge surely knew. RM phoned the son and barked, “I hear you're bringing witnesses tomorrow. Let me tell you something - things will get worse, for you, and for your mother, if you don’t withdraw.” (The witnesses were nursing home employees with first-hand knowledge of incidents of abuse, one of which landed Genevieve in the emergency room earlier that year.)

 It was not an empty threat. Weeks before, the son had served RM and Judge Donnelly a 25-page, 80 exhibit brief, [16] documenting what Genevieve had faced in two nursing homes in recent years. [17] It also detailed the nigh-deadly family intrigue in which the son had become entangled when he tried to advance his mother’s reasonable wishes. Her two surviving brothers, at a loss in a world where victim-blaming is rampant, had put her away in a nursing home, outside the county, when she was 59. [18] (Church trauma had felled their oldest brother in his 40’s.) To say her surviving brothers did not welcome the son’s efforts doesn't begin to convey the complex legal snares one led him into.

 RM’s intimidation on the eve of the hearing kept the son from attending, and in his absence Donnelly gave the guardianship to the lawyer. Within days the son was hospitalized for a nervous breakdown.

 One of two transcripts, (endnote 6,) should document RM committing perjury at the 7 December 2000 hearing.

 Like many seniors, especially those with disability, Genevieve hoped to live with one of her children, and to stay out of a nursing home. She at least wanted her freedom to see them, (Exh G.) She told witnesses she wanted her younger son to be her guardian, (Exh H.) There is in safe deposit dozens of letters she wrote to her three children, expressing how dearly she wanted to be close to them. The youngest one sought only to be her co-guardian; before he saw RM’s true colors, he suggested in writing that they share the work. This was in keeping with Genevieve's express wishes, (attested to by witnesses, letters, and an affidavit.)

 The lawyer made no reply, and Donnelly refused to order him to answer. Both are signs that this court does not adhere to the core principle of guardianship law: the duty to protect wards’ rights and reasonable wishes.

 RM and Donnelly trammeled on Genevieve’s wish to be close to her children. It is not difficult to prove they showed nothing but contempt for the US Supreme Court’s opinion in Stanley v. Illinois: “A parent's interest in the companionship of his or her children rises to a constitutionally secured right." Nothing but contempt for the decision in Carson v. Elrod: “No bond is more precious than that between parent and child - and none should be more zealously protected by the law." 

They caused Genevieve years of misery anguishing to witness.

Inheritance money was not a factor. Geneveive was nearly indigent. [22]

The son needed assistance from the court - to stem the mistreatment his mother was prone to, (survivors of childhood trauma are vulnerable to re-victimization;) to find good housing for her, and good medical care to help her cope with depressions so severe that she was sometimes unable to go out in public for months at a time. (Other women, the Irishwoman Marie Collins for one, [23] have reacted similarly to the problems that affected Genevieve ’s family of origin, namely child abuse in the Catholic Church. It left Genevieve and her brothers at odds with themselves and each other. (The youngest, a dear and gentle soul, (and damned by the church because he was gay,) died in his 40’s on skid row. A priest had seduced him in his teens. His last years he was a ghost of a man, gaunt, lost, trying to drink the pain away.)

 RM could have helped the son create opportunities for his mother to put the pieces of her life back together again – could at least have helped him stop the abuses she was enduring in the nursing homes. But the lawyer had a very different agenda. 

After Donnelly appointed him, almost every time the son reported the lawyer's misconduct, or an incident at the nursing home that harmed his mother, RM would suspend their visits and write up an accusation to make the suspension appear justified. His stories, often spiked with prurience, do not hold up to examination. But his ruse was clear: ‘Report my wrongdoing or your mother’s ill-treatment and you won’t visit her for a while, and I will rubbish your name.’ Guardians have that sort of control over their wards, and RM is not the only one who misuses it. The extent of the problem has been reported elsewhere, many times. (Social workers replacing lawyers as guardians in Franklin County (dispatch.com), for example.)

 Higher court affirmations aside, lower courts will allow nursing homes to ban family from seeing their loved ones when they report mistreatment. It is a serious injustice that Martha Deaver and her mother, [24] and Genevieve and her son, and too many others discover painfully. And experts warn it is happening more and more. [25] (Ladies Home Journal, June 2006.)

Barred from visiting your own parent after you object to their mistreatment? 

 It is an alarming trend in a democracy, if you think about it.

Correspondence between RM and Gene's younger son shows the lawyer going to strange lengths to obscure the fact that by separating Genevieve from the son, the attorney was destroying her last chance for meaningful contact with family. Her relatives in Cleveland kept her at arm’s length, so sharp was her tongue on occasion, and her other two children kept their distance, (and they lived 500 miles away.) Broken-family-syndrome can be a fallout of intergenerational, early-life trauma. RM fed off that. 

It is widely understood that residents denied family visits are the most susceptible to neglect, and abuse. [26] (In that neglect are the most profitable for nursing home operators.) [27] Genevieve’s youngest was the only person in her world wanting, and halfway-able to help her find at least a palliative for her condition and not one that left her so enervated as to be unable to care for herself. [28] He'd earned a bachelor’s in Psychology, and knew first-hand the pitfalls of standard psychiatric treatment, (well-described in the AARP Bulletin of July-August, 2014, [29] and in, Sweet Dreams or Nightmare, (Newsweek, August, 1991 [30] Trained in mandated reporting, and having ‘the keen eye of the invalid,’ he was an informed advocate for his mother. And they held much in common: love of literature, music, grass-roots politics. Medical staff, when it suited their purposes, would refuse to talk to the son about his mother's care because he was not "the guardian."

Locked away on a back ward filled with patients lost to trauma, (some, like Ms. Tankovitch, were deeply disturbed;) denied communication with the only person who had not abandoned her, Gene was sometimes beside herself with grief. It can be heard in phone conversations with the son that he recorded in the hope that the court, hearing her pleas directly, would grant her request to return to Cleveland.

Nursing home residents have the legal right to see their family, [31] - it is a vital safeguard. It is easily proven that RM violated that right, routinely. And painted himself into a corner fabricating stories to make it look as if the son’s “own conduct necessitated restrictions,” as the lawyer replied in a civil action the son filed in 2014. There is ample proof of his dishonesty, Exhibit I attests to the son’s visits with a close neighbor in a Cleveland nursing home in ‘013 and ‘015: the staff there, it can be shown, had no problem with him.

RM spoke to Genevieve perhaps once in the five years of his guardianship. It is because of his actions that her ordeal escalated - as he threatened it would, over the phone, in the evening on the 6th of December 2000.

This matter is timely in part because RM’s current wards are at risk for his unusually cruel brand of criminality. Bringing him to justice will spare them and their families upheaval not easy to encompass. It will increase law enforcement’s understanding of illegal practices in the probate courts. It stands to improve life, and the standard of care, for our elders. [32]

Investigation is timely also because of the probate court’s on-going failure to comply with the Superior Guardian statute. [33] For years it has suppressed examination of RM’s wrong-doing, most recently in February ‘015, (Case # 2014 EST 202296, filed to obtain medical records still unexamined and under the court’s control;) and in its rulings in Case # 2014 ADV 201355, and the original case, 2000 GRD 951350. 

In the latter, when Genevieve was trying to reclaim the legal rights she had lost under guardianship – (her efforts to do so preceded the son’s involvement) – court documents show Donnelly quashed every one of the son’s subpoenas to eye-witnesses - hospital staff and nursing home aides - barring them from testifying at hearings in 2000, 2004 and 2005. Gagging eye-witnesses is one way he colluded in his appointee’s crimes.

Had he welcomed their testimony, he would have learned that the son presented no difficulty to staff in the hospitals, (Exh G, for instance,) where his mother was frequently admitted due to bad care in the nursing home – and that he got along well with some of the staff at the facility. Which is to say, the judge would have learned that RM’s claims about the son’s conduct were fraudulent, and his violations of Genevieve ’s kinship rights, highly illegal and immoral.

The feeding tube: RM agreed to its use before any tests were done to see if Genevieve really had a “swallowing impairment,” as the nursing home claimed. He forbade the facility’s nursing director from discussing with Hayes the details beforehand, details suggesting she had no impairment, but rather had gone on another hunger strike, her second. [34] Long after the tube had been inserted, (“jammed into her guts,” one elderly woman said,) he finally ordered testing. And then withheld the results for 18 months, until the son twice reported the matter to the Ombuds.) The tests were inconclusive.

Genevieve, all the while, was pleading for real food. And often became seriously ill with infections from the tube. And when Genevieve demonstrated, first to Hayes and later to both sons, that indeed she could eat and drink normally, RM suspended Hayes’ visits - claimed he was “feeding” her -- ignoring the fact that she was feeding herself quite capably, and relished the food the son managed to slip to her now and then, as though smuggling contraband to a prisoner. (The one time that Rudd gave her food, he did so away from the nursing home.)

Even the simplest of requests – a phone in her room - RM ignored for three years, complying only after the son wrote Donnelly.

Of an afternoon when Genevieve and Hayes were allowed an increasingly rare visit, the unit supervisor ordered them into a small, common room crowded with catatonic residents, their appearance not unlike figures in a wax museum, a profoundly depressing and unnerving environment. At a nurses’ station nearby a signal from a resident’s room, summoning assistance, droned on and on.

“This,” Genevieve said sorrowfully, “is hell.”

Much of this will not be evident in the court file. It is in the ancillary paper trail, in safe-deposit, that the truth of all this and more will be found.

 And so it is requested that you investigate. The transcripts, or court reporters’ notes, of the 20 Dec ‘04 and 20 June ‘05 hearings, (Case No., 2000 GRD 951350,) will corroborate other documentation of RM’s five perjuries or official misrepresentations. 

Donnelly’s complicity, further described below, will be plain to see. And if the transcripts or notes have been destroyed, in violation of Ohio’s evidence tampering law, I believe you will find the existing paper trail adequate for RM’s conviction. And there is ready proof of the felony perjury he committed in ‘08 before OAG investigators, (Case # M2 08 0079) - it is seen by comparing Exhibits K and C. (He plied the same fabrication to the State Supreme Court’s Office of Disciplinary Counsel in ‘011, (File B1 – 1727.) And still he is not called to account. 

America has seen of late how practiced some officials are at the Deaf Ear act:  Officials at Michigan State, and at the US Olympic Committee, ignoring Larry Nassar's victims - for years; Penn State treating Jerry Sandusky’s the same; Baltimore, 2003: Dontee Stokes being prosecuted for shooting and injuring the Catholic priest who molested him when he was a boy and jurors acquitting him because, before he picked up the gun, he had sought remedy   through the proper channels  --  and no one could be bothered. Those astute jurors didn’t want him to pay the price for that again.

Jackson Katz has a Ted Talk that explains to a T how victims get ignored, spun around – and blamed. (Jackson Katz’s San Francisco TedTalk.)

 Katz shows why it can be difficult for survivors to even talk about trauma, why the Irishwoman Marie Collins, abused by a priest when she was young, couldn’t bring herself to talk about it for 25 years, (and then found it useless to talk with church leaders;) why Christine Blasey-Ford kept quiet 30 years; why Cleveland’s Michelle Knight, being freed from 10 years of dungeon captivity, was directly locked up again, in an assisted-living facility -- and there, “battered with needles,” as she has poignantly described it. “I was hanging in the wind,” she says. 

 The Deaf Ear act could be deemed a public health crisis, contributing to the mad procession of mass shootings America is witnessing. 

 We make this observation in the spirit with which Dr. King related systemic injustice to the inner-city riots of his day. He told a church crowd in Cleveland while riots were exploding in cities across the nation, “I am not in favor of the riots. I will do everything in my power to help avert them. But the cup of patience will run over; men will rebel at being cordoned off in an abyss of corroding injustice and despair. To ignore the cause of their grievance is an open invitation to that violence and civil disorder. … As a social analyst, I must speak honestly.” 

 How RM has managed to avoid prosecution and disbarment would well be investigated.

Gene's cause is similar to that in which a Family Court judge in Brooklyn, NY, was found guilty of fixing child custody cases in the fathers’ favor in exchange for cigars and champagne and such. It is reported in the New York Times article, “Investigation of Judge Touched Off Wider Inquiry.”

 That sort of quiet, circuitous corruption would explain the pattern of probate judges Anthony J. Russo (presiding as of November 2021,) and Donnelly throwing to the winds the Superior Guardian statute. And failing to assign a ‘special master,’ [37,] (court investigator,) to examine RM’s activities, when that clearly, to read the court file, was the proper course to pursue.

 On 19 December ‘014 Russo prevented inspection of this matter by dismissing a civil action the son filed against the attorney, (Case # 2014 ADV 201355.) His basis was the statute of limitations, but in going that route he ignored the more important principle at law, that those statutes are not intended to shield the wrongdoer from liability. [38]

 And the court had been shielding RM all along, denying remedy well before the limitations expired. Twice while Donnelly was at the helm his cronies in the Common Pleas court obstructed civil actions the son filed, or attempted to file

(Editors note: a separate file is being prepared documenting how both the county prosecutor’s office and the Ohio AG’s obstructed investigation and prosecution before the limitations expired. In 2009, for example, well within the limitations, the AG’s Medicare Fraud Unit Chief John Guthrie threatened Genevieve’s son with prosecution, (for “harassment,” he said,) after the son faxed him proof that RM had committed perjury before the AG’s investigators in 2008, (Case # M2080079.)

Lest this systemic legal sleight-of-hand obscure the years of escalating mistreatment Genevieve suffered under RM’s hand, here’s true perspective: When Dolours Price, an Irish Republican Army Captain, embarked on her hunger strikes in prison – (she played a key role in the 1973 bombings in London that injured more than 200) – the clergy interceded and she was transferred from an English jail to an Irish one, closer to her family. England’s prime minister later set aside her double life sentence, and she was freed. [39]

Margaret Thatcher treated a combatant, a sworn enemy of the state, with more than a measure of compassion. The judges here showed a disabled woman none -- see Timeline, below.)

Perspective: Saddam Hussein was force fed by feeding tube when he embarked on a hunger strike after his capture in ’03.

Was Genevieve, in refusing food, trying to hasten her death? No. This is evident in Exhibit H. She was doing the only thing in her power to draw attention to her ill-treatment.

 “It is not known whether notorious examples of abusive guardians constitute the exceptions or the rule on how guardianships actually function - there is very little data.” That’s from ABA attorney Nancy M. Coleman testimoney the U.S. Senate’s Special Committee on Aging in 2014. (Endnote 7.) Investigating RM will give us a little more data, much needed, for every five days, (and this is an underestimate,) a state ward dies a preventable death in a long-term care facility in Ohio. [40]

Former Justice Department attorney Marie Connolly: “Elder abuse is a growing epidemic, and should be part of the national conversation, but we as a nation are wearing earplugs; it is time we remove them." [41]

To families caught in that web of corruption linking nursing homes, courthouses and legislatures, the recommendations of the governor’s task force are like a silent movie playing to an empty theater. It needs to change.

Donnelly, (among others,) was wearing ear plugs. At the ‘05 hearing he refused to order production of the December ‘04 transcript, and I think you will see why. If the court reporter at the ’04 hearing was true to the oath of her office, her notes will document the son’s stated objection to the perjuries RM committed at that hearing, in ‘04. (A witness in the courtroom later swore out an affidavit attesting to the son’s objection.) Her notes will be telling evidence, as Donnelly instructed her to omit any reference to the perjury. He was tampering with a public document, (a 3^rd degree felony,) and a party to RM’s patterned crimes. He denied the son’s subsequent motion seeking remedy for the perjuries, one of which is examined below.

Early in ‘015 Russo’s Chief Magistrate, Heidi Koenig, blocked the son’s access to hospital records documenting the neglect and abuse related to the feeding tube, (Case # 2014 EST 202296.)

Their counterparts in the common pleas court and the appellate court ran interference for them, preventing the son from seeking remedy beyond the confines of the probate court.

The Courts’ persistent mishandling of these cases perpetuates its unlawful supervision of guardians.

After Genevieve had withstood the feeding tube for over a year, the son sued RM [42] to discover if there was any medical justification for the feeding tube, and to bring his mother back to Cleveland, nearer to him. (The nursing home was 50 miles away, and he had no car.) His older brother, Rudd, too, was growing impatient. Two days before the suit was filed, he wrote the attorney voicing his own concerns about the feeding tube, the lack of follow up treatment for the cancer, (“worse than inexcusable,”) and his mother’s isolation and marked unhappiness. The attorney replied with one of his trademark defamations. It drove a wedge between the brothers, as intended.

RM would present the letter in court to Donnelly, as though it constituted evidence just because he wrote it, but the proof of his dishonesty existed then as it does now - in two, recorded, phone conversations, between the son and Julaine Gates, the facility’s nursing director, and an aide, Terri McCabe. At the December ‘04 hearing the son questioned Nurse Gates on the stand about their conversation; unaware she had been recorded she denied what she had told him over the phone – she committed strawman perjury on RM’s behalf. The attorney would have faced serious liability, and he still should, had she told the truth. Her facility would have, too, had the facts about the feeding tube and a number of other problems been examined.

At the ‘05 hearing Donnelly refused to listen to more than the first few words of the recording of Nurse Gates and the son: “That,” he railed, “doesn’t sound like her! Turn it off!” (It was her.) He quashed the subpoena to the aide. In such ways he and his court obstructed due process during the entirety of the guardianship, causing Genevieve a slow burn of misery.

Almost every time she and her younger son talked on the phone she would ask him sadly, “When will I see you?” Eventually he was moved to ignore RM’s repeated orders suspending their visits. The first time, sympathetic staff welcomed him, but word got back to RM; the second, Easter Sunday, ’05, he was arrested, charged with trespassing. and jailed until he arranged bond. (The judge during pre-trial ruled against the son’s motion to present evidence of his mother’s ordeal. Jurors would have found it disturbing, and the son’s motives good, and acquitted him. The ruling foretold a mistrial and a lengthy appeal. After six months, the son had to accept a plea, the first of a series of hurdles to clear before he could see his mother again. (The governor’s task force was spot on about judges and prosecutors needing extensive “re-training” when abuse occurs in a nursing home.)

* Mary Dunn transcribed the ‘04 hearing under the employ of Rua Reporting Service. Owner Ron Rua writes variously that her notes cannot be transcribed, and that they no longer exist. [43] The legality of the latter, if true, would well be tested, for probate is a division of common pleas and reporters’ notes there are retained for 12 years, as an official reporter in that court, Richard Hamski, affirms in correspondence. A 12-year retention period would end on 20 December ‘016.

In Elrod, the federal court ruled that no bond should be more zealously protected than that shared by parent and child. [44] RM’s crimes, and the court’s, deserve zealous remedy.

* * *

The nation’s efforts to stop elder abuse are lagging two or three decades behind our work to stem domestic violence. - Kathy Greenlee, Assistant Secretary for Aging at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. [50]

                                                          * * *

Editor’s note: If some criticize this report because it is prepared in part by Genevieve’s younger son, Hayes, [51] it could be noted that in matters of law he is not entirely lacking in discernment. A close reading of the events leading to the removal of Judge Angela R. Stokes from Cleveland Municipal Court, indicates he was the first in Cleveland’s legal community to go on record and object to her misconduct: her docket [52] shows he filed to disqualify her from a case in June of ‘013 – three months before a wide-ranging grievance against her was submitted to the State Supreme Court’s disciplinary office -- and nine months before she was restricted by her administrative judge from hearing criminal cases. 

This report is as prescient; and the issues it raises, of equal import.

Can a person with a trauma-related disability, like Mr. Rowan, be considered a reliable witness? His condition can strengthen what some call, ‘the keen eye of the invalid’ – that and the moral impulse to raise the alarm when harm is afoot. He was the informant in Cleveland’s Rain Nightclub case in ‘04, after seeing signs of child trafficking. Sgt. Bernie Norman, (retired,) Cleveland Police Department, lead detective before the case went federal, has stated in a recorded conversation that Mr. Rowan was the only person who brought the matter to his department’s attention. There was only a shard of evidence, and Rowan, visiting the club briefly, recognized it for what it was. He had to report his suspicion two or three times before the city opened case; federal agents soon took over and the nightclub was shut down.

This report is as valid.

It is revealing to know that Genevieve’s brother was happy to allow her to move out of state with Hayes, and under his sole care, in ’89, and again in ’93 when the son found her so over-medicated she could not function, and facing eviction. But when the son had a rare opportunity to move to Cleveland, in ’94 and was the person most involved in his mother’s care, her brother refused to share the guardianship with him, leaving him no standing with her doctors and others upon whom she was dependent, and leaving her without an informed advocate.

Mr. Rowan's rap sheet -- what to make of that? Jackson Katz, in his San Francisco TedTalk, describes how American culture is steeped in victim-blaming and messenger-killing; the rap sheet is a prime example of that. It is an exercise in identity theft. It would not stand up to impartial examination

To return, RM had the opportunity, and legal obligation, after her brother washed his hands of the guardianship in 2000, to put Genevieve in touch with people in the community who could help her sort out the trauma that had derailed her life. The brief Mr. Rowan filed in November of that year provided the attorney with enough background to understand the issues involved, as well as Genevieve’s strengths and weaknesses.

While RM’s application to take control of Genevieve’s life was pending in court, Mr. Rowan wrote him, as was mentioned earlier, seeking his assistance, and asking in part if he would replace the guardianship with power of attorney. (An evaluation for that less-restrictive alternative is required by state law, [55] but there is no indication in the file that the court ever complied, and it ignored a motion the son filed in ’96 to allow that.) RM responded to the son’s requests, which would have given Genevieve a new lease on life, with threats, lies, and then complicity in her abuse.

As the Rain Nightclub was shut down, his law practice should be.

*****

** 9 March - Genevieve is struggling to breathe, and groaning on every exhalation from the pain of the stent, (Exh Q.)  The FDA had already issued its warning that Fentanyl can cause respiratory failure.

A Dr. Toye Williams asks her in her son's presence, “Is your pain sharp or dull?” “Sharp,” she gasps.

 “Point to it,” he orders. She indicates her pelvic area. He admits the stent may be causing the pain -- but he needs to talk with the urologist who inserted it, and, well, they work in different hospitals and that will take time ... [49]

Genevieve cannot get enough oxygen. Parched, feverish, she pleads for water; tries to draw some from a sponge swab offered her, but breathing takes all her effort.  

For two days she struggles for air until she loses consciousness. Her breathing and incessant moaning grow faint. A day passes so. After nightfall, her forearms, folded together, suddenly lift skyward, and then collapse, a gesture of resignation: she would keep trying, but can struggle on no more. And she is gone.

3 April  - The son calls Deputy Mary Brzozowski, Cuyahoga County Sheriff’s Department, who often was posted outside the probate court where the son appeared many times on his mother's behalf. He asks if she'll inquire with the prosecutor’s office about the laws that apply when an elder with disabilities is abused. 

Impatiently, without hesitation, she replies: “There’s nothing you can do. It’s too late. No autopsy was done.”

It's odd, the lack of an autopsy being foremost in her mind.

“How did you know,” he asks, “that it wasn’t done?”

She dodges. “Why don’t you ask Legal Aide?” She hangs up.

A governor’s task force, four years earlier, recommended that autopsies be mandatory when a disabled person dies while institutionalized.

 

Hayes Rowan

The Blackhawk Group

NYC 10019  CLV 44102

216 903 5201

hayesrowan@gmail.com

[1] Carson v. Elrod, 411 F Supp 645, 649; DC E.D. VA (1976)

[2] - transcripts of the 20 Dec ‘04 and 20 June ‘05 hearings, (Case No., 2000 GRD 951350) - timely and relevant for the reasons set forth below.

[3] - “political research,” they styled it - http://blog.cleveland.com/pdextra/2010/01/anthony_c_sinagra.html

[4] http://www.cleveland.com/countyincrisis/index.ssf/2010/09/the_cuyahoga_county_corruption.html

[5]  - in Case #’s 2014 EST 202296 and 2014 ADV 201355 –

[6] - of the 20 Dec ‘04 and 20 June ‘05 hearings, (Case No., 2000 GRD 951350)

[7]  - ABA attorney Nancy M. Coleman, testifying before the U.S. Senate’s Special Committee on Aging in 2014: http://www.aging.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/fr129nc.pdf. See also: ‘search warrants served as police investigate guardianship exploitation,’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCzV3pK84q4

[8] ORC - 2111.50(A). (1): At all times, probate court is superior guardian of wards …

[9] ORC - 2111.50(A). (1): (… probate court is superior guardian of wards …)

[10]  Plain Dealer, 5 Feb 02, B-5.

[11] Dayton Daily News, 20 Dec 02, 1-A; Plain Dealer, 5 Feb 02, B-5.

[12] Plain Dealer , 5 Feb 02, B-5

[13] When he wrote the letter RM knew that his threats six months earlier, and moreover, everything they signified, (one is examined below,) had shaken the son so badly that he was hospitalized for a nervous breakdown. Indeed, hours after reading that letter, he stepped into the snare and committed civil disobedience, writing out his protest with a marker on the courthouse steps - expecting to be charged with vandalism, for the opportunity to argue his mother’s cause in municipal court, remedy in probate having been denied the previous five years. (The county prosecutor’s office derailed that hope with a nine-count indictment, (Case No., CR-01-409693-ZA) - one attorney said the son was looking at 12 to 25 years if he took the case to a jury; he fired three or four attorneys before acquiescing to a plea. And so Genevieve’s mistreatment went unexamined, as did the illegalities in probate court. It was 30 months before the charges were resolved.

[14] ORC sec 3721.13 (A) (13) – residents’ right to be free from … chemical restraints …

[15] http://member.aarp.org/health/drugs-supplements/info-2014/antipsychotics-overprescribed.html

[16] “Answer of Successor Applicant,” date-stamped 6 Nov 2000.

[17] (e.g., being restrained near an open window on winter days until she caught pneumonia,)

[18] - after Genevieve had been institutionalized there 18 months, the facility’s social worker wrote to her family stating that the arrangement was improper; they ignored her; she wrote to the court, and Genevieve was allowed to return to Cuyahoga County, her birthplace, under the wing of her nephew, who meant well but was not equal to the difficult task of helping her manage her disability.

[19] Her daughter, Tracy, the eldest, died two years after her mother, of despair essentially.

[20] Stanley v. Illinois, 405 US 645, 651; 92 S Ct 1208, (1972)

[21] Carson v. Elrod, 411 F Supp 645, 649; DC E.D. VA (1976) (United States Court of Appeals, Fourth Circuit.)

[22] - RM ‘paid himself’ with Genevieve’s last three or four thousand dollars.

[23] http://www.npr.org/2014/05/11/311412142/a-voice-for-abuse-survivors-within-the-catholic-church

[24] http://www.aanhr.org/about_the_president.php

[25] Ladies Home Journal, June 2006.

[26] Elder Law, Mary R. Gallo, (Delmar, Cengage Learning, 2009,) pg 258:  “Very important is the location of the facility. Is it located so family members and friends can visit and monitor the patient’s care?” See also: 9-things-your-mothers-nursing-home-wont-tell-you/: “The more you visit, the better the care your parent will receive.”

[27] Mary Mendelson, Tender, Loving Greed, which won the 1974 George C. Polk Award for journalistic excellence.

[28] “I don’t feel like a person anymore,” she told him after being put on one medication in ’03. The side-effects led to her eviction from her last apartment.

[29] http://member.aarp.org/health/drugs-supplements/info-2014/antipsychotics-overprescribed.html

[30] http://www.newsweek.com/1991/08/18/sweet-dreams-or-nightmare.html ,   and         

http://www.newhavenindependent.org/index.php/health/entry/new_report_u.s._losing_the_battle_against_military_suicides/ 

[31] Code of Federal Regulations, Title 42, § 483.10(j)(1)(vii), and Ohio Revised Code 3721.13 (21) (a): “Residents’ right … to unrestricted communications with their family … (b): Reasonable access to a telephone for private communications… (c): visits at any reasonable hour.” 

[32] It bears repeating that Rick Madison, the supervisory agent formerly in the FBI’s Public Corruption Squad in northeast Ohio, tells of a nursing home suing him when he tried to move a family member to another facility -- it illustrates how some nursing homes show no regard for residents and their families.

[33] ORC - 2111.50(A). (1).

[34] Genevieve had previously gone on a hunger strike to protest abuse in another nursing home, (Exh H.) Prior to the insertion of the feeding tube, she was not evaluated for a swallowing impairment, but sent to Marymount Hospital’s behavioral unit. The nursing home claimed that she had an impairment because, they said, she had aspirated (inhaled) a spoonful of pudding - yet afterwards they initially restricted her to a diet of thickened beverages and soft food almost identical in consistency to pudding. When a hospital nurse observed Genevieve swallowing water from a sponge swab without difficulty, she told the son it indicated that Genevieve did not have a swallowing impairment; she was able to eat without difficulty the food her sons brought her. Aspiration can occur when a person with a suppressed appetite, (due to depression, or cancer,) is spoon-fed impatiently. Genevieve insisted that the nursing home’s story that she had a swallowing impairment was “ridiculous.” She is charted to have tried to help herself to food from other residents’ trays.

[35] Plain Dealer, 10 May 2005, editorial, Home Plate.

[36] An employee of Cuyahoga’s probate court says in a recorded conversation that attorneys were often seen giving gifts to her superiors during the time of Genevieve’s guardianship; the son observed the same.

[37] https://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/frcp/rule_53

[38] http://law.justia.com/cases/illinois/court-of-appeals-first-appellate-district/2001/1001586.html The criminal and ethics violations central to this matter, and the harm they caused Genevieve, are of sufficient gravity as to have compelled Judge Russo to set aside the lesser issue, statute of (con’t) limitations, in order to permit examination of the greater, RM’s abusive treatment of a woman with disabilities.

[39] Where the Bodies Are Buried - The New Yorker - Mar 16, 2015.

[40]  Cincinnati Enquirer, 27 March 02, 1-C

[41]  http://www.washingtonpost.com/llifestyle/style/macarthur-genius-grant-goes-to-dc-activist-who-fights-elder-abuse/2011/09/19/gIQANERzgK_story.html

[42]  - he filed in the general division of common pleas on 8 September ’04 where it was dismissed on the questionable grounds that probate court has sole authority over guardianships. The son appealed, could not afford counsel, and lost.

[43] In a 9 Oct ‘014 email Mr. Rua writes: “… Mary Dunn is no longer a court reporter and hasn't been for at least five or six years now. There's no way it [her notes] can be transcribed.”  Pressed for details, he changes his explanation in a follow-up email: “There is no transcript no copy no notes no way to help you out.”

[44] Carson v. Elrod, 411 F Supp 645, 649; DC E.D. VA (1976) (United States Court of Appeals, Fourth Circuit.)

[45] "Nay-Nay-Nay-Nay-Nay-Nay-Nay-Kee-Kee-Kee-Kee-Kee-Kee-Nyah-Nyah-Nyah-Nyah-Nyah-Nyah-Nyah …"

[46]  IN RE HITCHCOCK,  120 Ohio App.3d 88, 96 Ohio App.3d 660, 645 N.E.2d 837

[47] In the second sentence of ¶2, he claims that the month-long ordeal had already been resolved - “last Friday” – before the son reported it: “The nursing home agreed to make a [room] change anyway which you were told would happen last Friday [Feb 24^th] when a suitable bed became available” [sic]. That sentence should read - and there is a world of difference between the two - “… you were told last Friday the change would happen when a suitable bed becomes available.”

The director told both sons on Friday the 24^th that he did not know when the room change would happen. 

The paper trail shows RM doing this repeatedly – thoroughly obscuring the facts while making things worse for Genevieve.

Mid-paragraph he writes that the son, “once again attempted to go behind my back,” but the chronology of the sons’ emails to him, (Exhs M and N are two of five,) show this too is not true: before the son reported the abuse he repeatedly askd RM to intervene; the attorney did not (con’t) reply to the son’s increasingly desperate requests. Genevieve’s situation was dire; time critical -- the son turned elsewhere for help and for that RM threatened him with the family law equivalent of the death penalty – complete termination of kinship rights.

The simple and humane solution would have been to move Ms. Tankovitch out of the room, or allow Genevieve to leave the facility.

[48] There are far-reaching effects to the editor’s observation, cited above, that the nursing home lobby has bought the affection of the legislature.

[49]  - a Dr. Ravi, at Geneva Memorial –

[50]http://www.washingtonpost.com/llifestyle/style/macarthur-genius-grant-goes-to-dc-activist-who-fights-elder-abuse/2011/09/19/gIQANERzgK_story.html

[51] (- derogatories have attached to his name, as they tend to with whistleblowers’ -)

[52] (Case # 2013 CRB 017219 - journal entry of 26 June 2013)

[53] - Mr. Rowan refused to comply with a condition of probation requiring him to submit to psychiatric medication known for its debilitating side-effects -- medication which Dr. Magdi Rizk, the jail’s psychiatrist, would chart that he did not need. Judge Fuerst refused to take Dr. Rizk’s opinion, among other evidence, into consideration.

[54] http://www.npr.org/2014/05/11/311412142/a-voice-for-abuse-survivors-within-the-catholic-church

[55] ORC 2111.041(A)(2) & (3).