Shelly's column: Where does buck stop on abuse of elderly?
By Barb Shelly Kansas City Star Editorial Page columnist
Glenda Grimes described her mother’s death to police as “a gateway to a better world.”
Certainly, the world that 72-year-old Glenda Stevens knew in her final days was wretched.
An autopsy showed she was suffering from an untreated broken leg. She was malnourished. She had rib fractures, bed sores, cuts and bruises. The cause of death was listed as multiple blunt force.
Court documents detail other acts of cruelty. Grimes was tied to a potty chair for hours at a time. She was deprived of her life’s possessions and left to wither without diversions or acts of kindness.
Prosecutors this month charged Grimes, of Lee’s Summit, with second-degree murder. Jackson County Prosecutor Jim Kanatzar called Stevens’ death the worst case of elder abuse he’d seen.
It should have been prevented.
Interviews conducted by Lee’s Summit police following Stevens’ death show that family members knew she was being mistreated.
The Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services had received at least three hot line calls about Stevens’ well-being.
An investigator from the department checked on Stevens in June 2006 and observed bruises on her hand, burn marks on her arm and an unexplained mark on her face.
With Grimes sitting nearby, Stevens cowered and glanced her way before responding to investigator Dee Singleton’s questions.
“…I suspect physical abuse is occurring,” Singleton wrote in her report.
Yet Stevens remained with her daughter, and was increasingly isolated from other members of the family, according to a statement from the prosecutor’s office.
Whether relatives did enough to help is a question to be answered within the extended family circle.
The public’s interest centers on whether Missouri’s safety net failed Glenda Stevens. Unfortunately, the answer is elusive, shrouded behind Missouri laws that permit secrecy regarding abuse investigations.
In response to outrage over child abuse deaths, the legislature several years ago passed a law that enables case files to be opened when a fatality occurs.
No such provision exists in cases of elderly abuse. State law, in fact, prohibits the release of information except to law enforcement agencies and the Missouri attorney general.
My attempts to find someone in state government willing or able to search for answers ran into a stone wall.
A spokesman for Attorney General Jay Nixon pointed out that the office’s job is to defend the state against lawsuits, not initiate investigations.
A spokeswoman for Auditor Susan Montee said the responsibility for examining the case lies with the department director or the governor.
A spokesman for Lt. Gov. Peter Kinder, the state’s official advocate for senior citizens, said the office had pushed for tougher sentencing guidelines for elderly abuse, but had no grounds to examine whether the state could have prevented Stevens’ death.
Gov. Matt Blunt’s spokeswoman said he was troubled by the case and added, “While calls to the Elder Abuse and Neglect Hotline and related investigations are confidential… the governor expects the department to appropriately investigate and take action on situations of suspected elder abuse.”
The message is clear: Responsibility for investigating the Department of Health and Senior Services’s handling of the Stevens case rests with the department. The public will never know what happened.
That’s wrong from any angle. The public can’t learn whether the department made mistakes, and the department can’t exonerate itself if it didn’t.
A change in state law is needed. Records on elderly abuse cases should be treated the same as case files on child abuse.
“I would be in favor of that and support that,” Kanatzer, the Jackson County prosecutor, said this week. Now, which legislators will step up to change the law?
Court documents regarding Glenda Stevens’ death tell a piteous story of a frail woman at the mercy of her caretaker. She didn’t need a gateway to a better world. She needed someone to save her in this one.
© Copyright 2008 The Kansas City Star.
