In 2020 my father had become obsessed with getting into scams. That is being the scammee not the scammer. It was his daily obsession. We got over 25 pieces of scam mail a day. He was writing over $1,000 a month of checks to scammers. The phone rang every 15 minutes from a scammer. He was getting emails from the well known scam cons where you won millions of dollars, just send us $2,000. He believed everyone of them, and wanted to participate in everyone of them. He thought he was doing business deals. I had to watch him like a hawk, and basically could leave his presence. He had turned into a child that needed adult supervision every minute.
In the summer 2020, SR and I were living in a house in Oxford that I purchased just for him, so I could take better care of him. I did not want to live there, and would have preferred to live at our family farm house. I began intercepting the incoming and outgoing mail to stop SR from being mad in a chump. In just one month I intercepted over $1,000 in checks going out to scammers.
After a while he noticed a lot of checks were not clearing the bank. Pretty much all the checks he wrote, as I took care of real bills, and the only checks he wrote were for scammers. I would say one hundred checks a month to scammers. He confronted me about intercepting the mail. This was not our first discussion about the scam checks he wrote. I had power of attorney, and for good reason. I had told him before that I would do whatever it took to stop the scams. Matter of fact it was taking a lot of my time. I would estimate that 25% of my time and effort everyday, I spent toward preventing or fixing scams.
That afternoon he left the house and did not return. That was strange for him to just leave without saying where he was going. I saw on the phone he had made a call out. I redialed that number. It was the FBI. I assumed and found out later that he called the FBI to report me for stealing his mail. Night came and my father had not returned. It had rained hard that afternoon, and considering his poor driving skills, I assumed he got into an accident. I called the Lafayette County Sherriff’s Department. They said call his phone. I did. He was at the farmhouse and said he had moved out there because I was ‘getting in his business’.
I ask Evelyn to start going out to the farmhouse to ‘sit’ with him. I explained what was going on to her. I gave instructions to convince him to move back home. Seems like she could have convinced him during the nine months he lived there to move back to the Oxford house, but she didn’t. I was paying her more and she was getting more hours out there than at the Oxford house. The farmhouse was basically empty of furniture. The house is large and sits about a half mile off the road in a desolate part of South Panola County. It was not safe for him to stay there by himself. Especially since he liked to climb ladders, drive tractors and lawn mowers in risky situations. He cannot get back up if he falls. If he fell off a ladder, tractor or lawn mower, he would surely die. I could not legally make him move back to the house in Oxford.
In March of 2021 I sold that house for close to $300,000. We had two months to move everything out. I spent the next two months moving everything out. It was extremely physically and emotionally difficult. SR did not help or seem interested or understand the concept that I we had to move everything out of a large two story house that had been the original Montieth family house site since 1854. It took all the two months to move everything out before Closing.
I had told SR we would take the proceeds from the sale and buy a house in an area that we both wanted to live in and began looking for houses. I did qualify that we needed to get the Oxford house on the market before we could commit to buying another house. He did not understand or like that. He wanted to buy another house now. I showed him Zillow.com. He could not use Zillow.com on his on own, so he got Evelyn, the sitter, to help him look for a house. I allege at this point Evelyn decided she and SR would buy the house, and leave me out. They would look at Zillow in secret with his door closed. She never said, hey I am helping your dad look at houses on Zillow, which would have been the normal thing to do, since she was working for me. She thought she was keeping it a secret. When they would leave his bedroom, I would check SR’s internet history and saw they were looking for houses without saying anything to me about it. Also, one day while Evelyn and SR were mysteriously just driving around, a real estate agent called the house, said someone called about a house for sale near where our farm house was. It had been Evelyn that called, and they at that time were driving out to look at it. They never said a word to me, and that was suspicious.
About this time I decided it was time to put my father in a conservatorship. This was not an easy decision and I had been postponing it long enough. I had to get my life back. I could not spend all my time watching SR, so that he would not get scammed. When was a scammer going to figure out how to get a million dollars out of him? He would had fallen for it.
I enlisted Evelyn, the sitter, to help me. I had been discussing the matter with my Attorney Tom Suszec at Holcomb Dunbar for years. It was his contention that SR should be in a conservatorship. At least then I could legally prevent him from writing checks, and on a whim moving out of the house into a risky situation just so he could freely write checks to scammers.
The problem is that an only child can have all the evidence in the world and cause to put their parent into a conservatorship, but one had to have two Independent Medical Evaluations. The hard part is getting your parent evaluated without them knowing it, because they are not going to cooperate, and no longer trust the child. It’s a terrible situation, and one the State of Mississippi has failed at providing a legal solution for.
I have made an appointment with SR’s physician, Dr. Linder, in Batesville for an evaluation. Dr. Linder had done one of the IME’s used to put my mother in a conservatorship. I spoke to his nurse about what to do, and she agreed. Evelyn was to bring him to the Dr. for a routine visit and the Dr was to perform the evaluation procedures.
Evelyn had known about the trouble I was having keeping SR out of scams and she volunteered to help me. She would intercept the mail at the farm house, and she would tell me when a phone scam occurred. This time she took the evaluation as opportunity to destroy the father son relationship, and she told SR that from what I heard via hearsay, “JR was going to put in you in Conservatorship so he could put you in a mental asylum, and he was going to steal all your money and blow it on his friends.”
On 05/05/2012, the day of the house closing came. SR was abnormally excited. I had closed on many pieces of real estate for us, and he never showed an interest. Did not want to go the closing, or cared or thought about where the proceeds went. For the record, since I was his only heir, I had POA, and I managed all SR’s assets, I put our proceeds form all real estate closings into his TDAmeritrade account. This time since we we agreed to buy another house with the proceeds, I put the proceeds into our joint Regions checking account.
This will come up later. The exact steps were 1) close at the attorney’s office in Batesville. The attorney gave me a check ($250,000) made to both of us, as the property was owned 50/50. 2) SR and I drove together back to Oxford and stopped at the Regions branch on Jackson avenue, where we both endorsed the check and deposited it into our joint account. Regions gave us a schedule of when the check amount would be available for withdrawal.
When we got home, around lunch, SR took time to study the schedule of funds availability, as over the 5 days of so parts of the total amount would be available to withdraw. I thought this was odd for SR to be so interested in when the funds would be available for withdrawal. Again, he never cared about any other real estate sales, nor where the proceeds went.
Over the next few days, I did pay some of our debt down with the proceeds. I told SR about every single withdrawal I made from our joint account. He was good with it. I paid down SR Cosco Visa card that had gotten out of hand. I made a payment on my truck loan. All the transactions were accounted for in the accounting I was later required to submit to the court, and all transactions were accounted for and SR knew about them.
Evelyn and my father would still hang out in his bedroom with the door closed. I would check SR’s internet browser history. They had been looking at joint bank account on line. Thought that was weird. Evelyn has no business looking at the our banking business, especially behind my back.
Then on 05/19/2021 what I suspected would happen, happened. $230,000 or almost all the funds in the joint account were withdrawn from the joint account. Sr did not tell me he was going to withdraw all the funds. I also contend that he would not have come up with the plan of withdrawing all the funds without telling me, unless someone, Evelyn, had influenced him to do it.
I had assumed that SR moved the funds to his personal checking account at Regions. I checked his account, but could not access it. None the less, on 05/27/2021 I went online line and transferred $230,000 from his individual account back to the joint account. That transaction got reversed on 06/02/2021 for insufficient funds. I went to the Jackson Avenue Oxford branch of Regions to find out where the money went and to put it back into the joint account. Using my POA, I asked what account the funds were transferred to. They said it went into a new money market account. I transferred the funds back to the joint account on 06/09/2021. That same day I then transferred the money from the joint account to SR’s TDAmeritrade account, and my TDAmeritrade account. Since SR had no interest in his investment accounts he did not know how to access his TDAmeritrade accounts, although he did have the written credentials to do so. I made the assumption that Evelyn had influenced him to take the money, and now I assumed the money was safe from her. As we will see later, she used her undue influence and manipulation to get her hands on $500,000 of court protected funds.
A few days later, I get a call from the Regions’ branch in Batesville. SR is in the office of a manager of the branch. She asked me to return the money. I said no. I could hear SR in the background hollering, and as mad as I have ever heard him. She asked where the money was. I declined to answer, but said it was safe. We ended the call. A few minutes later she called back, and apologized for the call, but said she had no choice to call as my father was irate angry and forced her to call. She said I had done nothing wrong, and that my father needed some help, meaning psychological.
Later, when SR got home, I told him that I saw that he took the money, that I was anticipating that he would, and that I got it back. Told him it was safe, and that I would not give it to him. At this point I was not aware of how much Evelyn was involved or motivated, and thought the issue would pass. My father on his own did not have the capacity to initially steal the money nor hire a lawyer. My father has never hired or talked to a lawyer about suing anyone. I underestimated Evelyn.
In a few days I would find notes written by Evelyn of a call with Swayze Alford’s Llaw office. Per the notes she had discussed the case with Kayla Ware, and made an appointment for 07/26/2021. SR and Evelyn had continued to stay in SR’s bedroom with the door close. This was highly irregular and suspicious. They were acting like kids who were scheming something and did not want their parents to know, but of course the parents notice the strange behavior. I checked SR’s internet browser history, and sure enough, they had been to Swayze Alford’s website. Also, I noticed that they had pulled up the joint account at regions.
I assumed that a lawyer could not or would not take the case as there is not a case, against me. SR under the influence of Evelyn stole $230,000. I merely retrieved and put in safe keeping the funds, which was my duty under the POA. I had done nothing illegal, and it was obvious that SR was mentally incompetent, and Evelyn was using him, which is illegal. Also, I assume at the remote chance a lawyer would file a meritless case against me, I would get a demand letter, and I would explain the obvious facts of the matter. I was wrong, and I underestimated how predatory and unethical a lawyer could be. Swayze saw a family tragedy and decided he would profit one way or another. This is important to note, that is Swayze is predator with a law license looking for family tragedies to take advantage of. I believe that this behavior is beyond narcissistic psychopathic and is pure satanic evilness.
The day after SR had transferred the $230,000 of joint funds while under the influence of Evelyn, Evelyn drove SR to Jay Westfual’s office to have my POA revoked. Jay Westfaul did draw up an instrument that would revoke my POA, if had to be delivered to me in order for me to notified. Evelyn did not think about that. SR never delivered it to me, much less told me he revoked my POA. They did take the POA to the Regions’ Batesville branch. SR lived in the same house with me. He ate diner with me at the same table that evening, and he never stated that he revoked the POA. The reality of the matter, SR did not know what was going on, and was doing what he did because Evelyn told him. It is my belief that Evelyn told the transactions shown of our joint account on the webpage was evidence of me stealing his money. In reality, I told SR of every one of them. There was an audit trail and I was not hiding anything. Although due to his Alzheimer’s could not recall that I told him about every single transaction before I made it. I was not obligated to tell him or ask for his authority anyway.
It is my theory that Evelyn wanted the $230,000 back. SR was always wanting to show off what he could do to Evelyn. SR failed in at least keeping the stolen funds, and that embarrassed him so badly, that he completely changed his normal behavior and in anger at Regions when he demanded the money back. I am believe the loss of the finds disappointed Evelyn and this embarrassed SR. Money that in the past he had zero interest in, but Evelyn knew of this money. She saw a weakness. She convinced SR I was stealing his money, and this made SR very angry. So, instead of asking me about the banking transactions that he forgot about, he lets Evelyn take him to Swayze’s office to file a lawsuit in which he would claim all those funds were his, and I stole them. His only son that he lived with and had forsaken is own life to keep duty he had promised to his father.
After about June 15th, Evelyn would not come back to the house. She had mysteriously quit without notice. Funny, SR never asked if she would be coming back either. Around 06/22/2021 I would put a GPS on our Buick Lesabre. It was the car Evelyn would use to drive SR to appointments. I did this because of the unusual secret activity between Evelyn and SR. I was aware of theft of the money, and suspected they were attempting to buy a house. Not only were Evelyn and SR spending time in his bedroom with the door closed looking at the internet without saying what they were doing, they would sit outside, away from me and talk for a long period of times. This was unusual for them to stay away from me and just talk. The last few times she worked at the house and I would come home early, I could tell they had been in a conversation and would stop the conversation as I would walk in. Then immediately Evelyn would ask if she could leave early. A few times there at the end of working for us she would call or text and say she was sick and not show up. Then she just stop showing up without saying anything to me. SR never asked if why Evelyn did not show back up. She never came back to the house after mid June. Just about the time she made the appointment with Swayze. As the GPS tracker would show, she would start meeting SR in secret and drive around the country for hours. Also, the tracker would show her taking SR to Swayze’s office on 06/24/21, and she sat in on the meeting. Guess why SR did not ask if Evelyn was ever coming back. He already knew, and Evelyn was cooking up a plot to steal all his money, and SR could have cared less as long as he could have relationship with Evelyn.
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