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Hospital Worker Pleads Guilty in Elderly Scam
By J.K. Dineen, San Francisco Examiner
January 10, 2005
A former admissions clerk at St. Mary's Hospital has pleaded guilty to bilking an 81-year-old family friend of more than $47,000 and using some of the money to renovate her Daly City bedroom.
The scam is the latest in a series of cases being prosecuted by a new unit District Attorney Kamala Harris has set up to prosecute predatory lending and other financial crimes against vulnerable elderly.
Elizabeth Manzanares, 44, was arrested on Aug. 23 and charged with two counts of theft from an elder and one count of grand theft. Under the plea bargain, Manzanares pleaded guilty to one count of felony theft from an elder and agreed to pay the money back and serve three years of probation and three months of home detention, according to prosecutor Alan Kennedy.
The Manzanares and Armeit families had been close friends but had lost touch in recent years. The family friendship was rekindled in 2003, when Rose Armeit showed up at St. Mary's Hospital where Manzanares was working and where her now-deceased husband was undergoing treatment.
After Armeit's husband passed away, the widow asked the younger woman to help her with the bills, a task her late husband had always done. Manzanares agreed to help -- and she helped herself as well, writing more than 40 checks out to her own bank account and forging the older woman's signature.
Eventually Armeit got wind of what was happening through her bank, who called police.
"I think Manzanares saw an easy target and went after her," said Kennedy. "It was a crime of opportunity."
Kennedy said the crime took an emotional toll on Armeit, who does not have any children.
"It took away her sense of trust in people," said Kennedy. "When her husband passed away, she needed help and here was someone she saw as a lifelong friend."
Kennedy said the DA's two-person elderly abuse division, which Harris started when she took office last spring, has seen a huge influx of cases, many of which were referred to police by the Adult Protective Services, hospitals, and other nonprofits that deal with the elderly.
Because a large percentage of the cases involve a son, nephew or close family friend stealing from an older relative, they are the type of cases police and the courts have traditionally dismissed as "family matters."
But that is changing quickly, Kennedy said.
"These cases are no more just a family matter than child abuse or domestic violence is just a family matter," said Kennedy.
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