Senator Eliot Shapleigh - El Paso, Texas

Now in a nursing home, Billie Joe shares a room with a younger man.

Morris and Billie Joe were the kind of people guardianship programs are made for – old, vulnerable and, for all intents, alone.

At 75, Morris' mind was so clouded by Alzheimer's disease that a doctor warned he couldn't make the simplest financial decisions. Billie Joe was a child in a 63-year-old's body, lost without Morris at his side.

Neighbors and relatives say the brothers' lives shrank to one room of their cluttered Oak Cliff home. Toward the end, they wouldn't open the door even for their own kin.

Court records indicate that Texas Adult Protective Services had reports of the men's disintegrating lives going back six years before they moved the brothers, one by one, into a nursing home.

That happened in March 2002, after Morris fell and was rushed to a hospital, and Billie Joe stood for days at their front fence, hungry and wide-eyed, waiting for his brother to come home.

APS then walked away, leaving no one to speak for the brothers.

A nursing home wrote the Dallas County probate courts in May 2002, sending the doctor's finding about Morris' deteriorating mental state and advising that he and his brother badly needed legal protection.

But the courts, which grant "guardianship" in such cases for adults who have lost the ability to govern their own lives, did nothing.

Three months later, a stranger visited the nursing home and talked Morris into selling his and Billie Joe's house. Morris died weeks later, leaving his mentally retarded brother in the home, wearing charity-bin clothing and watching TV cartoons for company.

In any other big city in Texas, Morris and Billie Joe would have been sent quickly to a county-funded guardianship program. But Dallas doesn't have one.

While other big Texas counties spend hundreds of thousands of dollars each year to ensure legal protection for their residents who are indigent, incapacitated and alone, Dallas relies on what little money APS sets aside for indigent guardianships in the county.

Dallas County's probate courts, gatekeepers of the guardianship system, also have fewer guardian cases referred from the local community than other urban Texas counties. The lack of local funding, compounded by the relative lack of public contact with the courts, leaves gaping holes in an already flimsy safety net.

"It's mind-boggling," said Travis County Probate Judge Guy Herman. "There must not be a lot of poor people in Dallas County."

Dallas County Judge Margaret Keliher, head of the county's Commissioners Court, said she was unaware of the issue until a probate judge recently told her that The Dallas Morning News was examining county guardianship cases.

"Nobody's even mentioned to me that this is something that we should be funding," she said. "What other counties are doing is irrelevant to me. The real issue is, do I have a need in my county for my residents that's not being met?"

Deep-seated failures

Horror stories in Dallas probate court files – and other cases that local social workers and state officials say never reach the courthouse – suggest that answer is yes.

"Some of what's happened [in Dallas] is as big an outrage as anything I saw or read about in El Paso," said Gregg Phillips, a former Texas health and human services official whose statewide investigation of APS, mandated by the governor, was triggered by reports of elder abuse in the border city last spring.

"These are failures that are deep-seated. These are failures of the family. These are failures of the local community," Mr. Phillips said. "People need to remember that most of these cases are somebody's mama. It seems like Dallas has kind of taken a walk."

Texas law requires probate judges in larger counties and county judges in others to investigate and intervene if they learn that someone has become too physically or mentally incapacitated to care for himself.

A court can appoint a guardian to supervise care and finances if there is no less restrictive way to ensure a person's safety. And state law says county governments must foot the bill when one of their residents needs a guardian but can't afford one.

Guardianship experts say the legal process generally costs at least $2,000 in Texas, though legal fees can run far higher in cases involving large estates. Like other counties, Dallas County allocates some money for court-appointed attorneys to help move indigent cases through the courts.

But after a guardianship is approved, continuing costs of supervising a ward can run at least $2,000 a year, even if the person is has no assets. To cover that continuing expense for poor residents, all but two of the 10 Texas counties that have probate courts fund guardianship programs. Collin County, the only county other than Dallas without a county-funded program, has had a probate court only since January 2002.

Nationally, experts have found that every dollar spent in guardianship programs can save state and local governments $3 or more that otherwise would be spent on emergency room visits and hospitalizations, police calls and other stop-gap interventions.

The amount spent annually for guardianship programs by the state's other five big urban counties ranges from $136,000 in Bexar County to $2.2 million in Harris County. Those programs serve anywhere from 178 residents in El Paso to 1,300 Houston-area residents yearly.

"These people aren't transients. These people are good, solid citizens who've lived here and paid taxes for years," said Tarrant County Probate Judge Pat Ferchill, whose court was recently cited in a Government Accountability Office study as one of the four best court guardianship systems nationally.

"We've asked ourselves for years what happens in Dallas County. It's just a black hole," Judge Ferchill said.

In Dallas, the only public funds for indigent guardianships come from APS, and even state officials say that they don't begin to cover the county's needs.

APS' guardianship workers directly fund and supervise only 34 guardianships in Dallas County. The agency also gives an annual grant to the nonprofit The Senior Source, Senior Citizens of Greater Dallas to take on some of their cases. Even with additional fund-raising, that group can oversee only about 62 guardianships a year for people other than 50.

Kathleen Anderson, an associate counsel at the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services and director of the state's guardianship advisory board, said no one knows how many Dallas residents go without help. "Dallas has so few wards because you've got to have funding," she said.

Suzanne Cobb, guardianship director for the Dallas nonprofit, said she regularly gets calls from people with older or ailing relatives in crisis who need legal protection, including some who have been told by APS caseworkers to go to court.

"The minute you tell them they'll have to have an attorney, they say, 'I don't have the money,' " Ms. Cobb said, adding that all she can offer them are numbers for legal aid groups.

"I don't know what happens to those people, but my guess is that it ends right there," she said. "The family tries to handle things without a guardianship."

That can pose huge hurdles in getting an incapacitated senior needed medical treatment or long-term care – two things that people with dementia or other mental disabilities often resist.

For people without families or friends willing to help, things often go quickly from bad to worse.

"By the time they get someone's attention, they're liable to be in critical condition. We've had cases that are prime examples," Ms. Cobb said.

No funding

APS takes few cases directly to Dallas courts. Officials at the agency acknowledge that part of the reason is the lack of local resources to take over after a guardianship is created.

"Of course, you would be more inclined to refer people to guardianship sooner if you had plenty of programs to do the job," said Jean Wallace, general counsel of APS' parent agency, the Department of Family and Protective Services.

Fewer Dallas County residents in need come to the courts' attention through other avenues – local social service agencies, nursing homes, hospitals and referrals by individuals – than in other big Texas counties.

Although Dallas County's population is 46 percent larger, it has had a third fewer guardianship cases filed since 2000 than neighboring Tarrant County, court records from both counties indicate. Statistics showing how guardianship cases get to each county's courthouse suggest that the probate courts' guardianship process is more open and accessible to residents of Fort Worth than their counterparts in Dallas.

Between 2000 and 2003, about half of the 1,692 guardianships, temporary guardianships and related cases filed before Tarrant County's two probate judges started with referrals from nursing homes, hospitals, community groups, banks, lawyers, neighbors or relatives. That meant individuals in need could be helped without having to depend on someone finding and hiring lawyers to take their cases to court.

In contrast, Dallas' three probate judges had only 84 such cases over that three-year period – less than 8 percent of the 1,095 guardianships, temporary guardianships and related actions taken to the Dallas courthouse, records indicate.

"We've had people bringing people from Dallas County to Tarrant County because they know we'll get a guardianship for them quickly," said Tarrant County probate court investigator Barrie Allen. "We've had a number of instances where social workers from Dallas-area hospitals discharged patients to Tarrant County nursing homes because they've not been able to get anything done in the Dallas County system."

Dallas County's three probate judges would not discuss specific guardianship cases but said in an interview that it wasn't until the last year they began realizing that problems in guardianship cases involving abuse and neglect were systemic. That came after they hired a new team of court investigators who began bringing a pattern of problems – particularly involving APS – to the judges' attention.

"I know this raises the question, 'Why didn't those judges do something?' " Judge Nikki DeShazo said. "We can only do so much – only if it's brought to us."

The county's probate judges have met several times since June with local and state APS leaders to voice concerns about APS clients not being taken to court quickly enough. The agency has since stepped up legal filings and emergency actions, but the judges said they remain worried that APS isn't taking problems in Dallas seriously enough.

After being shown more than 100 of the most troubling cases found in The News' review of probate court files, the judges said they were even more concerned.

"Nobody's perfect, but once something is so egregious as some of these, you wonder why these matters were not brought forward to the court," said Judge Robert Price.

To help when APS finds problems and leaves it to relatives or friends to take legal action, the judges said they would start providing a list of local lawyers willing to handle guardianship cases for free.

But that won't help those who have no one to call on their behalf.

State officials said they and prominent probate judges outside Dallas sent a delegation several years ago to urge the Dallas judges to become more vocal about the issue. Ms. Cobb said she went with Judge DeShazo after that to talk with several county commissioners about Dallas' growing needs and what Texas' other biggest counties have done.

"We never heard anything back," Ms. Cobb said of the Commissioners Court. "I don't know why there's never been any further discussion."

Judge DeShazo and her colleagues declined to discuss the matter. "We've found working behind the scenes is a better way," said Judge Joe Loving Jr.

Added Judge DeShazo: "The problem is there are a lot of cases out there and a limited number of people to address them. People will fall through the cracks. There is no perfect system."

Barely noticed

Dallas' probate judges acknowledge that the current system barely noticed Morris and Billie Joe. Court records indicate that it wasn't until more than a month after Morris had died that the probate system tried to help either of them.

A new court investigator was then assigned Billie Joe's case, and records indicate that the nursing home social worker who first referred Morris to the court begged for someone to figure out what had become of his house – noting that its proceeds could have been used to help take care of his brother.

Someone did put a copy of the deed of sale – when Morris signed over his home on South Franklin Street to a Fort Worth corporation called "The Establishment" – in Billie Joe's court file. The file also has a note suggesting that someone should check the nursing home's visitors' log for clues to who might have visited Morris on the day he signed the deed.

But after Billie Joe was appointed a guardian from Senior Source in April, nothing else happened at the courthouse. Ms. Cobb said her agency didn't think about trying to track down what had happened to the house because it lacks the resources for such inquires.

If anyone had looked in public records from other Dallas government agencies, however, they would've quickly turned up what happened.

In checks with the Dallas Police Department and county property records, The News turned up both the stranger who bought the men's home and the names of some of their relatives, none of whom had ever been contacted by the courts or APS.

Tammy McCormack, the brothers' niece, said she called police in spring 2002 after passing her uncles' home and noticing they weren't there. She had lost contact with her uncles, even though she lived only a mile away, because Billie Joe had been kept apart as an embarrassment to the family and Morris had become combative and estranged, she said.

In October 2002, Mrs. McCormack called police again after driving by their home and noticing a door was open. She said she got a call several days later from a man who said he'd heard about her call to police and wanted to speak with her in person. She said the man eventually gave her mother nine family photographs, said nothing else from the brothers' home was salvageable and the house was now his.

"We didn't understand. There were nice things there – my grandmother had antiques in that house. But we never got any of it," Mrs. McCormack said.

She said she pressed for information on her uncles, and the man told her that he'd last seen them at a Mesquite nursing home, shortly before Morris died. "I called nursing homes all over Dallas," Mrs. McCormack said. "I never could find out anything. We just assumed that Billie was dead, too."

It was not until she was contacted by The News that Mrs. McCormack or her family learned of Billie Joe's whereabouts.

"My biggest problem with all of this – who was this man who ended up with my uncles' house?" Mrs. McCormack continued. "He told us only that he goes around and buys houses. He never answered my question of, 'How do you know my uncles? How did you get them to let you buy that house?' I didn't think that this kind of thing was legally possible. But who was I to question it?"

Mrs. McCormack is on probation after pleading guilty in March to stealing at least $6,500 from the Dallas elementary school where she worked.

Jay Torres, who bought her uncles' house, told The News that an assistant from his small real estate investment company visited the nursing home where Morris and Billie Joe were taken. He said the woman befriended Morris, and after several visits, the old man agreed to sell his house.

Before the sale, Mr. Torres said, he personally checked Dallas County probate files to see whether Morris was under a guardianship and found nothing to indicate that the transaction couldn't go through. He said he did not know that Morris had been diagnosed as incompetent three months before.

"We checked with the nursing staff, too, and they said he was fine. They just wouldn't put it in writing," Mr. Torres said. "He seemed fine to us."

Asked what he paid, Mr. Torres said, "I don't recall. This happened a few years ago. At this point, I'm not sure I should continue talking with you."

Morris died 15 days after the sale of his largest known financial asset, and he was buried in a pauper's grave on Sept. 10, 2002. It's unclear what happened to the proceeds of the sale of his and Billie Joe's house, which is appraised at $60,000.

The day after Morris' burial, Mr. Torres filed the deed at the courthouse showing that his company owned the brothers' home. In late October 2002, two weeks after learning that Morris and Billie Joe had family, Mr. Torres sold the house. Property records do not show what he paid for the house or how much he received for its sale.

"Someone at the nursing home let us know that he had died," Mr. Torres said. "I guarantee that everything is on the up and up."

Juanita McNamara, who lives on the other side of South Franklin Street, said she and her son still wonder about what happened.

"Morris, I remember that he had promised his mother before she died that he would never put his brother in a nursing home, that he would stay home and take care of him," she said. "Billie, he'd always just hug my neck and seem so glad to see me. I hate to think about him in some nursing home, alone in the world."

Since learning his whereabouts, none of Billie Joe's family has visited the home, where he shares a room with a younger man who blares loud rap music on the radio while Billie Joe colors with crayons and watches TV reruns.

But Ms. Cobb visits Billie Joe several times a month.

She and her organization's volunteers know he is lonely and take him on outings whenever they can. She acknowledges that everyone who should have helped failed him and his brother.

"We didn't act fast enough," she said.