To: Mike DeWine, Governor of Ohio, and Michael O'Malley, Chief Prosecutor, Cuyahoga County.
Top law enforcement ignores attorney’s flagrant abuse of disabled woman.
We the undersigned respectfully petition Ohio Governor Mike DeWine to re-open Case # M2 08 0079 in the Ohio Attorney General’s Office, their alleged investigation into the abuse Genevieve Gallagher-Rowan suffered in a nursing home immediately before her death; abuse with her court-appointed guardian’s fingerprints all over it.
Her family sent the investigators proof that the guardian committed felony perjury before them. They refused to examine that evidence, and the crimes it was meant to conceal.
Abuse against women can’t be tolerated under any circumstance. But it’s severity is magnified when committed under color of law.
Governor DeWine, by ensuring that the guardian answer and pay for the methodical cruelty with which he treated Genevieve, you can affirm the federal court’s affirmation in Carson v. Elrod that, “No bond is more precious than that between parent and child, and none should be more zealously protected by the law.”
Bears repeating: There is no bond more precious than that between parent and child, and none should be more protected by the law.
Genevieve’s guardian walked all over that law in his mud boots. As did his investigators.
“A parent's interest in the companionship of his or her children,” the US Supreme Court held in Stanley v. Illinois, “rises to a constitutionally secured right.” Guardian and investigators scoffed at that good decision, too..
“Few forms of inequality are as shocking and inhumane as the injustices we see in health care,” Dr. King told the Medical Committee for Human Rights in Chicago in ’66. The varied abuses Gene endured, until she could bear no more, meet that description. They are in part documented at blackhawkgroup-midwest.blogspot.com and bookofsusanna.blogspot.com. To allow regulators to ignore what was done to her, and to her son who tried to protect her, speaks horribly of our system of government.
Governor, Gene was a victim of childhood trauma. Recent research from the US National Institutes of Health, ("Trauma is a Public Health Issue,") shows that victims of childhood trauma are vulnerable to recurring abuse. They deserve protection, for they’ve already suffered more than their share, far more.
Sir, we urge you to re-open Case # M2 08 0079 and see this matter is brought to rights this time.
Why is this important?
Genevieve was a survivor of the abuses in the Catholic church; she was married for 25 years; a mother of three; a newspaper reporter. The cruelties she experienced under the hand of guardianship lawyer Ronald L. McLaughlin of Lakewood Ohio for five years are difficult to describe. The county prosecutor and state AG’s office continue to sweep it all under the rug. The nursing home lobby runs the show.
The county has a history of corruption. Former commissioner Jimmy Dimora, now in prison, was partying with call girls in Vegas while Genevieve was being treated brutally - not unlike a prisoner of war.
The Ohio Attorney General's Office should, with House oversight, re-investigate this case, beginning with the perjury McLaughlin plied to state inspectors, to throw them off his tracks. Their boss, OAG Marc Dann, was thrown out of office for criminal behavior towards women.
Genevieve’s mistreatment is not difficult to prove, nor was it unique. The Cincinnati Enquirer reported a few years before her death that a person with disability suffers lethal mistreatment in a nursing home every five days in the State of Ohio. And women have faced mistreatment in the courts since Old Testament days. ( bookofsusanna.blogspot.com/ .)
We remind Governor DeWine and the Prosecutor O’Malley of the federal court's decision in Carson: “No bond is more precious than that between parent and child, and none should be more zealously protected by the law.”
How it will be delivered
In person.