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How An Unwanted Guardianship Cost A Firefighter His Freedom And His Fortune

by Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman
March 22, 2008

Norman Baker is an American hero who has been detained against his will for more than three years.

His “crime”: owning too much property. 


His sentence: a court-appointed guardianship on the brink of costing him everything he spent his life building.

His rights in this case: virtually none, significantly less in many ways than an actual law-breaking criminal. 


His future if this continues: long-term de facto imprisonment, followed by abject poverty, if he has anything left at all. 


A retired firefighter who once helped save a child’s life, Norman Baker is not suspected of terrorism. He has never been charged with any statutory infraction, and has never been in any kind of trouble with the law. 
But he has been stripped of his right to vote and access to his own assets, which appear to have been weel in excess of $1 million as little as three years ago.

Until he was placed in a nursing home against his will by the court-appointed attorney he is trying to reject, Norman Baker owned and managed two dozen rental properties, many of which he designed and built himself. He also owned a 33-acre farm, with four horses, an array of tractors and other heavy farm implements, a carefully preserved century-old barn, a restored farmhouse from which he drew steady rental income, and a 3,000-square-foot brick home, which he also designed and built.

All Norman Baker’s properties were free of any liens or mortgages. 
Before he was confined against his will to a nursing home, Norman Baker also had some $250,000 in cash and liquid investments above and beyond his real estate holdings. He rented his properties and lived a quiet, private life.

Today, without writing a check or using a credit card or making a single bad investment, Norman Baker has less than $20,000 in cash. Most of his rental properties are vacant. Some have been flooded. In one, a broken pipe has resulted in a water bill in excess of $19,000. Nearly all his properties, which were once entirely rented, are now vacant. Some have been seriously vandalized. A rental property business, which yielded a steady cash flow, is now bleeding cash every month.

Baker’s farm implements—including a tractor owned by his brother—were sold by his unwanted guardian without his permission. The guardian also sold the slate off the roof of Norman’s carefully preserved antique hay barn, which may now be ruined by rainwater. The roof of his farm house has also been damaged and left unmended.

The comfortable brick ranch home Norman built by hand is boarded up and rotting. Its plush carpeting has apparently been stripped out. Its interior fixtures are gone or rotting. The concrete backyard swimming pool whose construction Baker oversaw is cracked and in ruins. When we visited the property, Baker could only peer into the windows of his wrecked home. It is posted against “trespassers.”


At one point in his involuntary guardianship, a medical examiner hired at Norman’s expense found him competent and recommended that he no longer need a guardian. But the attorney running Baker’s guardianship refused to surrender control of Norman’s assets. He then brought back the same medical examiner for yet another examination. This doctor then proclaimed he “changed his mind” and that Norman needed a guardian after all. Norman was then billed some $2,000 for both examinations.

Since then, a Harvard-trained medical examiner has repeatedly tested Baker, who just turned 80. This doctor, whose most recent examination has been videotaped, has consistently found Baker competent to manage his own affairs and to hire his own professional help.

More than a year ago, a physician for the nursing home where Norman has been confined recommended that he be given an immediate discharge to the community. Baker walks three miles a day inside the home, and does his own laundry. He is dependent on no medications.


Norman Baker’s case is not an isolated one. Usually guardianships are necessary where someone has no assets or no family and there has been no estate plan appointing a fiduciary. However, throughout the United States, tens of thousands of elderly citizens with significant assets have been placed under court-appointed guardians.

Though regulations vary from state to state, the attorney-guardians are required to report periodically to the county probate court on the disposition of the assets. Commonly, the attorneys charge fees for “managing” the property of their wards.

The law requires a guardian to act in the ward’s best interests. But often that is a major issue between the guardian and his ward that must be balanced by the Probate Judge, who is expected to act as the “superior guardian”.


By and large, legal guardians are expected to pay regular visits to their wards. According to Baker, his court-appointed attorney has visited him just twice in more than two years.

Norman Baker has continuously requested that he have input in to the property management of his estate. But he has been ignored. Decisions have been made about Norman’s bank account and his properties without his knowledge or input, and over his continued objections and complaints.

Baker’s court-appointed guardian was recently more than six months late in providing the court with a report on the status of Norman’s assets. Such reports are required by the Fairfield County court every two years, although the better practice is an annual account. Baker’s cash assets have been drained, and many of his properties have been brought to the brink of ruin. But it is unclear whether or not all his bills have been properly paid.

Acting on his own, Baker has managed to contract with independent counsel. Susan Wasserman and Lewis E. Williams of Columbus have asked, on his behalf, that Fairfield County Probate Court Judge Stephen Williams set Baker free of his guardianship. But Judge Williams has refused and Norman Baker remains confined to a nursing home against his will.


Baker’s troubles began in January, 2005, when he suffered a urinary tract infection. Reports for elder abuse are confidential and it is unclear who made the recommendation that his affairs be turned over to a guardian.

Whatever the situation at that time, Baker has long since recovered. But he still remains under a guardianship established at a hearing in front of Judge Williams where Norman was not represented by legal counsel, and was not in the presence of a blood relative. 


This fall, after numerous attempts to terminate the guardianship, Attorneys Wasserman and Williams moved in the Fairfield County court that Baker’s guardianship be vacated.

Ohio law stipulates that someone being subjected to a guardianship has the right to have his closest relative from within the state be present at the determination hearing. Norman Baker’s daughter was not notified because she was out of state, and notification to her was therefore not required by law. But it was mandatory under the law that Norman Baker’s brother Robert be noticed, as he lives in-state and is “next of kin.”

Because guardianships are invasive proceedings, strict requirements are meant to safeguard situations in which a probate court has such unfettered power over a human being. Norman’s brother, Robert Baker, of Celina, Ohio, has since stated under oath that he would have attended the hearing had he known about it, and that he would have argued then—as he does now—that his brother did not want or need a legal guardian then, and does not want or need one now.

Robert Baker also charges that the attorney appointed by the court to be his brother’s guardian sold his own personal antique tractor—inherited from his father—from his brother Norman’s farm, and has never accounted for the proceeds.

Norman Baker’s farm has also been stripped of many of its accouterments without a full accounting. Its buildings have been left to rot. The land itself may be worth a million dollars or more. Baker’s guardian has stated that he has gotten numerous calls from developers wanting to buy it. 


Judge Williams has repeatedly refused to vacate the guardianship. Nor has he set for hearing the objections filed by Baker to the late and incomplete accounting as to what precisely the Guardian has accomplished on his behalf.

By Ohio law, such an accounting was many months overdue until Norman Baker demanded that the account be filed. 
 In December, 2007, at Norman Baker’s behest, Attorneys Wasserman and Williams filed a motion with the Chief Justice of the Ohio Supreme Court, Thomas Moyer, asking that Judge Williams be removed from the case. Baker’s chosen attorneys argued that Judge Williams’s handling of the case “gives the appearance” that there is little hope of Norman Baker escaping his unwanted guardianship, and regaining his freedom with due process of law as guaranteed under the Ohio and U.S. constitutions.

Chief Justice Moyer has recently established a high-level commission charged with looking into the guardianship system in Ohio.
 Nationwide, hundreds of cases similar to Norman Baker’s have been reported at places such as the www.stopguardianabuse.org web site. The Los Angeles Times ran a major expose several years ago which has resulted in reform in many states. Extreme as Baker’s case may seem, numerous state and local court records are filled with cases of guardianship discord.

Moyers turned down the request that Judge Williams be removed from the case. An appeal on Judge Williams’s denial of the motion to vacate the guardianship has been filed in the Ohio Court of Appeals, Fifth Appellate District.

Thus far, Norman Baker has been in constant litigation for three years against the guardian appointed over him by the court. Norman’s guardianship was imposed in a hearing at which he was unpresented by counsel, and had no relative at his side, even though his brother lives in the state. He is no longer allowed to drive a car or vote. He has been deprived of the management of his properties and of his cash accounts, which by all indications have been seriously mismanaged. The home Norman built with his own hands has been largely ruined through neglect. He has been unable to obtain a full accounting of what has been done with his assets.

In essence, someone who has committed a murder or robbed a bank has more rights than have been granted Norman Baker.

Though the furthest thing imaginable from a terrorist, Norman Baker has no access to habeas corpus, or to a speedy trial.

Every night, Norman Baker goes to bed in his unwanted nursing home, praying for his freedom. If anything, his case stands as a bizarre warning against getting inconveniently ill, even briefly, while being in possession of enough assets to attract a legal guardian to “protect” you in your later years.

As a Franklin County firefighter, Norman Baker worked to save lives. Now he must fight to save his own. “I never dreamed such a thing could happen in this country,” he told the Free Press. “I just want to go home.”

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Letters of support for Norman Baker can be sent to Box 09683, Bexley, OH., 43209 or to harvey@freepress.org.

Robert Fitrakis is an attorney, and publisher of the Columbus Free Press. Harvey Wasserman is author or co-author of a dozen books, and senior editor of The Free Press . He is the spouse of attorney Susan Wasserman. Originally published by https://freepress.org.

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Ohio’s Voting Machines Are Now An Official Crime Scene

by Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman
March 17, 2008

At least 15 touch-screen voting machines that produced improbable numbers in Ohio’s 2006 statewide election are now under double-lock in an official crime scene. And the phony “Homeland Security Alert” used by Republicans to build up George W. Bush’s 2004 vote count in a key southwestern Ohio county has come under new scrutiny.

The touch-screen machines were locked up after Ohio’s new Democratic Secretary of State, Jennifer Brunner, tried to vote last fall. On November 6, she spotted a gray bar with the words “candidate withdrawn” in a slot where the name of Democrat Jay Perez should have appeared. Her husband, voting nearby, told her Perez’s name did appear, as it was supposed to, on his machine.

Perez had been a candidate in the race for Franklin County Municipal Judge. He withdrew his name after the county had finalized its ballots. But it now appears the ES&S machines left his name on some machines but not on others. Perez, a Democrat, wanted to avoid playing a spoiler in the race. But the appearance of his name on some machines may have helped Republican David Tyack win.

Brunner now worries that the state will never find out what happened. County election officials ordered the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation to seize the machines. Ohio Attorney General Mark Dann is conducting an investigation that may cost the state $48,000. Brunner recently told WVKO 1580AM radio: “When you’re talking about democracy, it’s priceless.” In another interview with the Columbus Dispatch, Brunner noted “This is a huge problem. There is great concern that not every voter has the same ballot.”

Ironically, Brunner requested a paper ballot in the March 4, 2008, primary, but a poorly trained poll worker gave her a provisional ballot instead. Two other staffers from her office were also given the wrong ballots. Brunner has since pledged to upgrade the training for Buckeye State poll workers.

Brunner further announced that she’s banning the practice of so-called “sleepovers” where poll workers take the programmable and easily hackable voting machines home with them overnight prior to an election day.

Brunner succeeded Republican J. Kenneth Blackwell as Ohio’s Secretary of State. She has vowed to make sure the Buckeye State does not repeat the experience of 2004, when Blackwell choreographed the theft of Ohio’s 20 electoral votes for George W. Bush, giving him a second term in the White House. Since taking office Brunner has vowed to shift the entire state to voting on paper ballots, a move being fiercely resisted by numerous Republican-controlled Boards of Elections throughout the state. Thus far Brunner has forced the resignations of BOE chairs in two of Ohio’s most populous cities, Cleveland and Columbus.

Matt Damschroder was removed as Franklin County Board of Elections Director on the Sunday prior to Ohio’s 2008 primary election. Damschroder was previously suspended for a month without pay for accepting a $10,000 check from a voting machine salesman at the BOE building. The check, made out to the Republican Party, was delivered on the day the state’s contracts for electronic voting machines were open for bidding. Damschroder was former chair of the Franklin County Republican Party and the state’s leading foe of paper ballots. “Damschroder was very opposed to paper ballots and was stoking the fire against them,” Brunner told WVKO.

Dennis White, the new director of the Franklin County BOE was skeptical of the masking problem, but says if it happened, “it’s huge. We have a federal election coming up this November,” according to the Dispatch. White, who admits to having little knowledge of computers, is the former Ohio Democratic Party Chair.

That election may once again hinge on Ohio’s vote count. In 2006, Franklin County officials failed to conduct mandated tests on each machine, instead testing only one machine per precinct on a random bases. A report by SysTest Labs, a Colorado consulting firm, confirmed that what Brunner saw on her machine was “exactly what you’d see if someone masked a name,” the Dispatch reported.

Investigators also found that the “audit logs” on the voting machines were turned off by a board programmer in April, 2007, which has hindered investigators from reconstructing software changes. White says the vendor told a board employee how to disable the auditing system, allegedly to speed programming. Brunner said other vendors told her that “You’re never supposed to tell a (client) how to do that.”

In the primary this past March, the BOE allegedly did test all Franklin County’s machines. But some counties ran out of Democratic paper ballots as an influx of apparently Republican and Republican-leaning independents flooded the polls, apparently to vote for Hillary Clinton.

Meanwhile, the Cincinnati Enquirer has reported that a “casual conversation” between a “friendly” FBI agent and the county emergency services director in a parking lot may have contributed to the phony Homeland Security alert that prompted the Warren County BOE to lockdown the vote count in the 2004 election. The BOE declared the emergency and then moved the ballots from the publicly designated vote center to a nearby unauthorized warehouse. They also barred the public and media from witnessing the counting. Warren County, which is outside Cincinnati, then gave Bush 72% of the official vote count, far exceeding expectations. With neighboring Butler and Clermont Counties, Warren gave Bush a margin of 140,000 votes, which exceeded the 119,000 margin by which he allegedly won the election.

The Enquirer reports that “hundreds” of e-mailed complaints poured into the county BOE after the election, including one from an angry voter in the United Kingdom. “Stop destroying our democracy,” said one voter from South Carolina.

The Free Press has previously reported that Warren County BOE employees were told on the Thursday prior to the 2004 election day, that there would be a Homeland Security threat on election day. An examination of the ballots by a Free Press investigation team uncovered numerous irregularities in the Warren County vote that helped give Bush the presidency again.

—
Bob Fitrakis & Harvey Wasserman co-authored HOW THE GOP STOLE AMERICA’S 2004 ELECTION & IS RIGGING 2008 (www.freepress.org) and, with Steve Rosenfeld, WHAT HAPPENED IN OHIO from New Press.

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Bob Bytes Back Archives: 6/26/1996 Welcome To The Neighborhood

6/26/1996
FEATURED ARTICLE
by Bob Fitrakis and Sally MacPhail

Last week, the University Area Commission, Campus Partners for Community Urban Redevelopment, the Columbus Development Commission and the Columbus Historic Resources Commission all adopted resolutions endorsing the University Neighborhoods Revitalization Plan, a 250-page document drafted by Campus Partners that addresses just about every aspect of off-campus life from trash collection to land use, from drinking and drug abuse to community schools. Intended to encourage reinvestment-financial and philosophical-by present and prospective businesses, residents, students, and the university itself, the plan has been a source of public debate for the last few months. Critics charge that the proposed clean-up will eradicate a unique multi-ethnic urban community.

Around the Ivory Tower It is the sweeping-some might say, overwhelming-way in which Campus Partners is approaching OSU’s role off-campus that has had some observers worried. One of the most vocal critics of the former Final Draft was Columbus Alive columnist, Bob Fitrakis, who called it former Campus Partners President Barry Humphries’ “mission to make the campus area safe for Max and Erma’s….In fact, in the original draft of the master plan revealed in November, yuppification north of campus and ghettoization south of campus were the twin pillars holding up the new campus fortress.”

Asked to react to Fitrakis’ comments that the plan might result in gentrification that would eradicate the campus counter-culture, Campus Partners’ Marc Conte said: “I think he’s pretty right. Those are pretty much my sentiments. When [other board members] ask for my opinion on retail, I say we can look at the record stores and see that the independent record stores survive, not the chain stores. People like the independent businesses, they like the uniqueness of the area; that’s one of the reason we’re shopping here, ’cause there’s no other reason. And the other thing is that there’s an incredible amount of retail diversity; now just because Target isn’t up as the main sign for the area doesn’t mean you can’t find everything that you find at Target.”

Among the major long-term projects for revitalization of the commercial strip along High Street are three theme areas-one at Lane, one at 15th, and one at 10th-that will be the “rooms” through which one progresses. At the north end, a widened and realigned Lane Avenue will mark an “expanded international village,” drawing upon the mixed uses and multi-ethnic restaurants in the area. There will be an Arts Gateway at 15th across from the Wexner Center. The last and most controversial component is an entertainment/retail/office/commercial development at High Street where E. 11th and W. 10th would be realigned to meet. Among the chain ventures suggested as possible occupants of the site are Max and Erma’s, The Limited, The Gap, and Urban Outfitters.

“All this talk about Max and Erma’s by Campus Partners, they really don’t understand the market or how to deal with the residents. What’s their college-trained manager going to do the first time a member of the rugby team comes in to their upscale restaurant and pisses in a corner? How are they going to handle that? What they don’t want to admit is that the bar owners know this area, we know this market and we’re professionals,” commented Brad Miller, owner of Maxwell’s.

Conte, too, is unwilling to give in yet to the notion of High Street as a mall with major retailers anchoring it. “The problem I know we’re going to run into when they want to build new structures or new businesses, to build those structures they’re going to have to have a national caliber retailer in order to convince the banks that they should get more money for it. …Wherever that happens, I’ve really been encouraging that that be our last resort.”

“High Street has enormous potential,” Campus Partners’ community liaison Steve Sterrett said. He maintained, though, that “It’s not working well now. Students are spending their discretionary funds elsewhere.”

A self-created war zone

Miller, for one, thinks the fault for that lies with the police. “This is the hardest place in the nation to own a bar… It’s a war zone. They’ve dehumanized the students. The police have to realize that the students are not the armies of darkness,” he said. Miller argued that the original Campus Partners rhetoric about “a dangerous neighborhood in decline,” has added to the south campus woes.

He pointed out that because of the conflict with the police, students are now “paying to get out of this area” and drink at places like Mekka. “It shouldn’t have to be that way,” Miller said.

The Columbus police take a drubbing in the Campus Partners plan, both for their lack of sensitivity toward students and their failure to follow through with the Park, Walk and Talk program designed to get officers out of their cruisers and onto the sidewalks. Mark Hatch, director of Community Crime Patrol and a member of the Campus Partners board, has already begun meeting with law enforcement and student representatives, according to Sterrett.

Campus Partners is seen by both south campus bar owners and residents as sort of a new temperance movement. At a December meeting of the Undergraduate Student Government Assembly, Humphries lectured students on partying “responsibly.” President E. Gordon Gee is quoted in the April issue of the Ohio State Alumni Magazine as saying: “I have no intention to make [student life] boring. . . [but] there will be no plebiscite on the fundamental issue of change.” Most of Gee’s envisioned “change” has focused from the beginning on downsizing the south campus bar strip.

Gee recently told students lobbying for domestic partnership benefits that change takes time and he used Campus Partners as his analogy. “When I first came here six years ago I knew something had to be done, so every year, six years ago, five years ago, four years ago, I asked for money to do something. I finally got the money….” Gee conceded that critics may correctly view his attack on the south campus bar strip as a return to the principle of in loco parentis, the notion that the university should act as a surrogate parent to students under the age of 21.

Citizenship 101

Certainly, even under the modified Final Final Draft, the university is expected to take a much greater responsibility for its students. It calls for students to be trained for community service, for the university to assess that service, for incentives to be provided to encourage service, and for students to follow the code of conduct anytime they are engaged in a university-related activity, a modified in loco parentis.

Campus Partners’ Conte agrees that the university “should definitely be taking a more active role; then how that’s done is the question.”

One way that the university could begin addressing the problem would start right on campus, with increased expenditures for student activities and health and counseling services. Mindbogglingly, the university spends about 10% of what similar institutions spend on alternative activities for students, according to the Campus Partners plan. As the instructional fee for students has risen, tuition costs have been controlled by keeping the general activity fee-that which pays for non-instructional programming-low. As a result, there is not much that the university provides students to divert them from haunting the High Street bars.

In the meantime, there is not one full-time person working on alcohol abuse on campus, according to Conte. “There’s nobody on campus that’s trying to coordinate activities to reduce alcohol usage and prevent alcohol abuse, and I think that’s why we have all the problems on 12th Avenue because there hasn’t been any planning…. This alcohol position was recommended to be funded as part of OSU’s budget process, but the last I heard from OSU vice president on Student Affairs [David Williams] was it wasn’t going to be funded.”

Williams was in Africa last week and could not be reached for comment.

Despite the university’s disinvestment, Conte thinks the students need to realize their responsibilities. He is encouraged by planning among off-campus student and year-round residents to meet and orient students new to the neighborhoods. The idea is to be pro-active with students moving off-campus “so you immediately make them partners in that neighborhood….. And the students need to realize that they might be here temporarily, but they’re stewards of the university and the university area.”

Extending its boundaries

Work by Campus Partners has not been limited to the East Campus neighborhoods. Language in the Final Final Draft is deliberately more inclusive than in earlier drafts in an attempt to extend the university’s responsibility to the north and south as well. 
“There’s still a lot of things missing,” UAC’s Skubovius cautioned, “particularly in the northern third of the district. A little money could go a long way.” But he called the extensively revised document “more acceptable.”

In the north campus area, Campus Partners initially worked closely with the Glen Echo South Civic Association. That collaboration spawned an oppositional organization, The Common Ground Forum. The Common Ground folks objected to the original Campus Partners proposal to close and redirect area streets. Joe Demshar, the owner of Top Priority Pizza, emerged as the most vocal critic of the Campus Partners plan.

“It’s been mostly quiet up here since Barry Humphries’ departure,” he stated, although, at a May 22 meeting of the Civic Association, Demshar claimed that Campus Partners’ spokesperson Julie Boyland “discredited herself.” Boyland presented the Campus Partners perspective on the need for “traffic calming” and the closing of Fourth Street. “It was quite a fiasco,” Demshar declared. “Julie attempted to shout down the Common Ground attorney Laura Sharp. She kept yelling: ‘Where do you live? What are you doing here?'” while Sharp was presenting the less-intrusive Common Ground proposals calling for stop signs and speed bumps.

Demshar believes that the election of Jim Hubbard, of the Common Ground group, as vice president of the Glen Echo South Civic Association at a June 3 meeting signals the ability of the neighborhood to solve their traffic problems without Campus Partners’ intervention. “They have nothing to do with anything up here anymore. We can solve our own problems without their involvement,” he said.

The university in drag

Unlike the University Area Commission, Demshar is unwilling to endorse Campus Partners’ Final Final Draft. “Who is Campus Partners? It’s the university in drag. Why do they deserve the other side of High Street? It’s a land grab by the university using a not-for-profit entity as a diversionary tactic to get involved in commercial enterprises,” in Demshar’s analysis. He asked, “How well managed are they? They bury nuclear waste and cadavers under the Fawcett Center and forgot about it.”

Echoing the sentiments of the UAC, Demshar dashed off a list of what he sees as the real needs of north campus: “If Campus Partners, and I mean the university, wants to do something for us, let them fix our streets, improve the lighting, help us get new sidewalks and curbs, bury the utility lines, build green space, clean our streets, improve the landscape-that’s what this area needs. Not the Limited!”

” As a student, I’m concerned about the displacement of people and the problems. If the rents go up, everything gets nice, and people can’t afford to live here, where are they going to go?” Conte asked, raising the same concerns. “And again, [there’s] this feeling that there’s this assumption that there is no community here. But it is there and we threaten to destroy what communities we do have.”

“I’m torn because I understand the economics of it,” he continued, adding, though, “I know I don’t agree with everything that’s in [the plan], but I know something needs to be done,” Conte concluded.

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