Woman’s family says caregivers drained her money #NewsUnitedStates

In October 2022, the private caregiver of 91-year-old Geraldine Clark called her patient’s family with some alarming news.

Clark, whose nest egg had long afforded her a comfortable lifestyle in San Francisco, couldn’t make rent, and her caregiving staff hadn’t been paid in weeks, the woman told Clark’s nephew, David Stewart. 

Clark lived modestly and paid less than $2,000 a month for her rent-controlled apartment. The dividends from Clark’s stock portfolio should have been more than enough to support her and her 24-hour home nursing staff, Stewart surmised. 

Instead, Clark was moved to a government-funded nursing home as her family scrambled to access her bank records. It wasn’t until after she died, four months later, that the reality of Clark’s financial collapse came into focus. 

Over the course of seven years, Clark’s caregivers allegedly cashed out more than $4 million on top of their salaries, according to a trustee’s investigation into Clark’s finances. The trustee, who had been appointed by a court to manage Clark’s finances after her death, found that the funds had been paid out through hundreds of checks, which had been signed by Clark but filled out by someone else. 

“There were months that (the caregivers) were pulling out $100,000, $200,000,” Stewart said in a recent interview with the Chronicle. “It was like a piggy bank.” 

It also wasn’t until after Clark’s finances cratered that her family found, through medical records in her apartment, that she had been diagnosed with dementia in 2016. Clark at the time had no remaining family in the area; the Stewarts lived in Southern California and her niece, David Stewart’s sister, in France. While the Stewarts said they had noticed Clark’s mental faculties declining, they never were told about any official diagnosis. 

Over the past year and a half, Clark’s surviving family and trustee, Heather Yarbrough, compiled hundreds of pages of financial statements, medical records and other documents and sent them to San Francisco police as evidence of what they believed was brazen theft from a vulnerable adult. 

The Stewarts said they received few updates on the investigation until August, when an email from  detective Sgt. Justin Woo seemed to close the door on the chance of the case moving forward. 

“Case was presented to the DA’s Office and was declined,” Woo said, noting that he was unable to locate the lead caregiver, who received the bulk of the overpayments and seemed to have written the checks. “Without testimony from the deceased victim, the DA’s Office will be unable to prove this case beyond a reasonable doubt.”

But after the Chronicle reached out to the district attorney’s office for comment, prosecutors refuted Woo’s statement.

“No arrest warrant or evidence was presented to our office for review on this matter,” prosecutors said in a statement.  “If and when a case is presented to us by the San Francisco Police Department … we (will) carefully review all of the facts and evidence gathered to see if we can pursue criminal charges.”

It’s not unusual for caregivers to be accused of exploiting the elderly. But any efforts to prove wrongdoing are often complicated by privacy laws, the high cost of legal fees and the subjective and complex nature of mental acuity. 

Instead of a criminal prosecution, these types of cases are typically handled in civil court, where there’s a lower burden of proof.

“Criminal law will not punish these types of wrongdoers, nine times out of 10,” said John Hartog, a Bay Area attorney who specializes in trust and probate law and isn’t involved in the Clarks’ case. 

Clark’s family, however, believed there would be little to gain by suing the caregivers, whom the Chronicle is not naming because they were not charged with a crime. Hiring an attorney would be costly, and some sleuthing of the lead caregiver’s  social media posts by Kaira Stewart suggested the money was long gone: Around the time of the alleged theft, the Facebook accounts of the primary caregiver and her family featured photos of pricey vacations, new vehicles and a new house.  

The Stewarts said the lead caregiver also repeatedly contacted David Stewart after his aunt was moved to a nursing home, and then after she died, to ask for money, claiming that she was still owed for missing paychecks. 

The Chronicle reached out for comment from the lead caregiver through emails, text messages and phone calls, and did not receive a response. 

The Stewarts came to believe that a criminal prosecution would be the only way to hold the caregivers accountable.

“I feel terrible about what happened to my aunt, No. 1,” said Stewart, who said he considered his aunt a second mother. “But I feel like there’s another family that this could happen to again.”

Clark and her partner, William Clement, never married, had children or moved in together, settling instead into separate, one-bedroom apartments in the same Financial District high-rise.   

They also never combined their finances, Stewart said, even as Clement’s investments made him wealthy. Clark, who for three decades worked for a farming company, had invested wisely and maintained stocks inherited from her family.

“She didn’t want to feel like she had to be taken care of,” Stewart said. 

As Clark and Clement aged, both began receiving home care from the same caregiving staff, which they found through a placement agency. Within months, though, they soon began paying the staffers directly. 

In November 2022, at about the same time Clark ran out of money, Clement died. He left behind little family but a $140 million estate, which his will directed to an array of think tanks and research organizations throughout the country. 

He also left Clark $500,000, the Stewarts said. But the funds were tied up in probate court, and it took 18 months before any of the money would be released. 

When Clark was transferred to a nursing home the month after Clement died, her brokerage account that held $5 million between 2010 and 2018 was worth $185.

Before Clark’s death, the Stewarts considered her caregiving staff as extended family. 

David and Kaira Stewart live in Southern California and relied on the four women as their line of communication to Clark. The Stewarts typically visited Clark once every one or two months, and would take the staff  out to dinner, or bring them gifts such as Warriors T-shirts.

“My feeling was that … this was much better than going to a (nursing) home,” David Stewart said. “She was comfortable.” 

Before her mental decline, Clark had also expressed her desire to live at home — both to her family and in a living will. 

David Stewart said he later realized, after the money vanished, that the caregivers increasingly intercepted phone calls and visits with her family. 

The lead caregiver “would say, ‘Oh, She doesn’t want to see you,’ or ‘She’s sick,’ or ‘She has COVID,’” David Stewart said, noting that many of the funds were taken during the height of the pandemic. “I think they seized that opportunity, because she was so isolated.” 

The Stewarts said they also never thought they would need to worry about this type of crime, because Clark had a trust, a will and a health care directive.  She had even planned and prepaid for her death expenses.

“She made it known to her family she didn’t want to burden us with having to take care of her and all her affairs were being taken care of and managed by professionals,” Kaira Stewart said. 

Yarbrough, the trustee appointed just after Clark’s death to review and oversee her finances, traced Clark’s missing millions to an account managed by Wells Fargo, where she found more than 1,000 canceled checks made out to the four caregivers. 

“I sat with the manager of a bank until 8:30 at night, pulling all the checks and getting everything together to have a case,” Yarbrough said. 

Yarbrough compared the cashed checks against a checkbook register located in Clark’s apartment, with entries written in the lead caregiver’s handwriting. Repeatedly, Yarbrough said, the checks were written and cashed for thousands more than corresponding checkbook entries indicated. 

Also found in Clark’s apartment were documents that showed each of the four caregivers was supposed to be earning $30 an hour, Yarbrough wrote in her police report. With the overpayments, however, the hourly rate shot up to more than $416 an hour for the lead caregiver, amounting to more than $4 million over what the staff should have made from 2016 to 2022. 

Also troubling were emails showing the lead caregiver corresponding with Clark’s financial managers, and medical records that the caregivers  had not previously shared with Clark’s family. 

The reports revealed Clark’s dementia diagnosis as well as years of monthly prescriptions for 150 5mg pills of hydrocodone. While the Stewarts don’t know the amount Clark typically consumed in a day, multiple studies have connected the painkiller, along with other opioids, to a higher risk of dementia and cognitive decline in older adults. 

“Every time a prescription was written it was by the request” of the lead caregiver, Kaira Stewart said, citing notes in Clark’s medical file. 

Yarbrough submitted her findings to both San Francisco police and the FBI in May of last year. While it was the first time Yarbrough had reported any of her cases to law enforcement in California, she had investigated two similar incidents at her previous place of work in Pennsylvania; both of which were prosecuted. 

“I had no idea they would do absolutely nothing about a crime of this magnitude against an elderly person here,” she said. 

Federal officials also declined to take the case, according to an FBI spokesperson. Officials with the U.S. Attorney’s Office did not return a request for comment. 

In the year after Yarbrough submitted her report to police, both she and the Stewarts said they called or emailed Woo, the San Francisco police sergeant, on multiple occasions to check the status of the case and offer more evidence if it was needed. 

Woo, they said, rarely responded, and never asked to speak to David or Kaira Stewart.

At one point, however, Woo told Kaira Stewart that he had located one of the caregivers and spoken with her about the investigation. The woman told Woo that Clark was simply very generous, and that she had willingly overpaid her staff, Kaira Stewart said Woo told her. 

“A woman that saved her whole life is going to blow through her entire life savings and leave herself with no money only to be put in a government nursing home?” Kaira said. “Doesn’t make sense.”

San Francisco police spokesperson Evan Sernoffsky said Woo had discussed the case informally with prosecutors. Sernoffsky said Woo had conducted a thorough investigation, but that there was not enough evidence to move forward. 

However, days after the Chronicle reached out to police and prosecutors on this story, Yarbrough received a call from the district attorney’s office, Yarbrough told the Chronicle. The caller confirmed that the office was not contacted regarding the case, and suggested providing proof of incapacity to the police sergeant. Yarbrough said a review of her records confirmed this information had previously been provided. 

After this development, the Chronicle emailed Sernoffsky a list of questions regarding Woo’s work on the case. Sernoffsky said he couldn’t respond to these questions, due to it being an “open and active investigation.” 

“Generally speaking, we frequently consult with the District Attorney’s office when conducting investigations, often before we present cases for prosecution,” Sernoffsky said. 

Kaira Stewart said she has since begun emailing and calling police again, requesting to sit down with investigators and go over the evidence. 

So far, she said, she has not received a response. 

Reach Megan Cassidy: [email protected]