I was served during the receiving line. My sister wants the accounts frozen. She’s alleging I withdrew forty-one thousand dollars from our mother’s savings without authority. The forty-one thousand went to the nursing home. Every dollar. Her petition lists eleven withdrawals. Nine of them are wire transfers to the facility with the invoice number in the memo line. She attached the bank statement showing those memos as her own Exhibit B.
Her lawyer highlighted the amounts. He didn’t read across to the memo column. I sent the facility’s ledger to the court, and it matches to the penny. Then the administrator called me and said she’d been subpoenaed too, and that in her file there was something my sister had signed in 2021 that said the nursing home bills were to be paid directly from our mother’s account. My sister had signed every authorization herself.
The administrator emailed me the document. My sister had also listed herself as the person responsible for coordinating payments, and the facility had copies of every invoice. The remaining two withdrawals weren’t mine either. One was a cashier’s check made payable to the pharmacy, and the other was a transfer to the hospital. Both had supporting records. My sister had attached only the account page showing the amounts, leaving out everything that explained where the money went.
Then my attorney found something much worse. The bank’s original records showed that my sister had been added as an authorized signer on the account in 2021. She had made several withdrawals herself before Mom went into the nursing home. When the judge asked why she hadn’t disclosed that, her attorney said they were “irrelevant to the present petition.” The judge disagreed. Then the nursing home administrator produced one final document: a payment agreement signed by my sister stating that all legitimate transfers from Mom’s account for her care were authorized. The signature was dated three months before the first withdrawal she was accusing me of making.
