Aggregator

The restaurant’s final day of service will be Sept. 29.

The Missouri Supreme Court kicked back a case on police identification numbers. It's a Sunshine Law victory.

Former President Donald Trump questioned polls showing a close race against Vice President Kamala Harris and complained about the conditions of an upcoming debate during a Fox News interview Wednesday in Pennsylvania. Under questioning from a friendly interviewer, Sean Hannity of Fox News, in front of an arena of cheering supporters in Harrisburg, the Republican […]

Nearly a decade without an NFL team in St. Louis, it might still be difficult for some locals to invest their fandom in the Rams or another football team.

Bryant's teammates are wearing armbands with his jersey number on them.

After The Original Crusoe’s closed earlier this year, Stevie Limmer LaChance and Elliot LaChance quietly opened the restaurant and bar on August 30 in the space formerly occupied by Keeton’s Double Play.

After The Original Crusoe’s closed earlier this year, Stevie Limmer LaChance and Elliot LaChance quietly opened the restaurant and bar on August 30 in the space formerly occupied by Keeton’s Double Play in Bevo Mill.

Sharon Rohrbach, co-founder of the Nurses for Newborns organization that has aided at-risk babies and their parents for more than three decades, died Tuesday. She was 81.

O'Fallon city planners will consider three proposed subdivisions Thursday night that would add more than 600 homes to this fast-growing community.

Congress couldn’t pass a new farm bill last year, so it punted. The extension of the old bill ends in less than a month, on Sept. 30. It will likely miss that deadline, too, an unprecedented two-year delay. Farm state representatives predict doom without a new farm bill. They would have us believe we will go […]

More is needed to keep the building competitive. A recent report said the dome needs more than $150 million in upgrades over the next 10 years.

The Missouri Department of Revenue updated the process that Missourians must go through to change gender markers on a state ID. A new rule requires either a court order or proof of gender reassignment surgery. But as Anna Spidel reports: advocates, health law experts and LGBTQ+ Missourians say the new regulations could create serious problems for transgender, nonbinary, and intersex people in the state.

ST. LOUIS - We made it to 87 on Wednesday, and we have one more warm day to go Thursday. There will be sunshine Thursday with highs around 90. By the evening, a cold front will be pressing into the St. Louis region. The front is expected to bring some light rain and maybe an [...]

Pink Floyd's David Gilmour is crediting his wife, Polly Samson, for helping him clean up his act.In an interview with The Independent, Gilmour reveals that it was an ultimatum from Samson…

Source

The three-car crash happened at about 4:15 a.m. at the I-55 northbound/I-70 eastbound split.

If you read their surveys, they say they need access to credit. Nevertheless, Kamala Harris wants to give small businesses a deduction.

by Jake Pearson

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

Update, Sept. 16, 2024: Judith Zbiegniewicz said she received a series of checks after this story was published. One was from New York Guardianship Services, which paid her $5,400 in compliance with the court order mentioned in this article. Zbiegniewicz said the company’s check was dated Aug. 30, the same day that ProPublica reached out to NYGS for comment. Separately, Carrington Mortgage Services paid Zbiegniewicz $5,000 and her husband $2,500 to honor a prior housing court settlement, as per the same court order. The lender sent the checks late last week, following ProPublica’s inquiries.

A New York judge has ordered one of the city’s most prominent guardianship companies to return thousands of dollars to an elderly woman for the court-mandated care and oversight it failed to provide her.

Supreme Court Justice Lee Mayersohn wrote in an Aug. 8 decision that the company, New York Guardianship Services, billed Judith Zbiegniewicz monthly but provided “minimal services, if any” for years, including at the height of the coronavirus pandemic.

During that time, Zbiegniewicz, who was living under guardianship for depression and anxiety, said she and her husband spent a night on the streets, moved into a city shelter and finally found affordable housing on their own.

Zbiegniewicz and her decade-long journey through the state’s broken guardianship system were the subject of a ProPublica investigation earlier this year. The reporting showed how that system, which is plagued by chronic delays, lax regulation and minimal oversight, has failed to protect thousands of aging and sick New Yorkers who judges have declared incapable of managing their own affairs.

The people most affected are poor wards like Zbiegniewicz who have no friends or family willing to look after them — a group dubbed “the unbefriended” in industry parlance. To care for this group, the city relies on a network of nonprofits. New York Guardianship Services represented itself as one such group and was assigned by the court to be Zbiegniewicz’s guardian.

Despite its representations, NYGS, which serves hundreds of wards, is not actually registered as a nonprofit with state and federal authorities, ProPublica found.

For roughly a decade, the company paid itself from Zbiegniewicz’s bank account, even as she complained about deteriorating living conditions. The problems that she described — living with bedbugs, rats and no heat — persisted for years, and NYGS did little or nothing to fix them while it collected monthly stipends from her limited funds. She said that she eventually tried to reach Mayersohn to flag the neglect and hold NYGS accountable but that her attempts were unsuccessful. The judge’s secretary, she said, simply referred her calls back to the guardianship company.

That changed in June though, after Zbiegniewicz attended a hearing to formally dispute NYGS’ accounting — protests she had previously articulated in a letter to the judge. During a court appearance, she complained to Mayersohn about her time as a ward of NYGS. She said she told him that there was “no excuse for what they put me through.”

Mayersohn’s decision, informed by that hearing, requires the company to return $5,400 to Zbiegniewicz for some of the fees it took between January 2019 and July 2022, a stretch in which she effectively lived on her own outside the guardianship.

The order separately requires the bank that owned the rat-and-bedbug-infested Queens home where NYGS placed Zbiegniewicz to honor a prior housing court settlement, which it has yet to pay. Under the deal, the bank owes Zbiegniewicz $5,000. If it doesn’t pay, she can seek to reclaim the money in court, though Zbiegniewicz said she was skeptical that the effort and cost of doing so would be worth it. An attorney for the bank didn’t respond to a message seeking comment.

In an interview, Zbiegniewicz said that she was pleased with the ruling, but that she was more happy that Mayersohn finally heard directly from her. She also said that she wanted NYGS to be held to account for its actions.

“I got some kind of justice, but the justice would be if they would be taken out of guardianships completely because they do not do anything for the people,” she said.

As part of its reporting, ProPublica identified more than a dozen cases like Zbiegniewicz’s in which NYGS failed to meet the needs of those entrusted to its care. In one case, a woman who’d had two strokes was placed in a nursing home where she was left to sit in soiled diapers, a family member said. In another case, the company continued to collect payments for a man’s care even after he left the country and later died.

Brothers Sam and David Blau, who run NYGS, and a lawyer for the group did not respond to an email seeking comment on the judge’s decision. In response to ProPublica’s previous reporting, Sam Blau, the group’s chief financial officer, said that “we are accountable to the Court” and emphasized that the group’s financial paperwork was scrutinized by examiners who had the power to raise issues. He called the reporting “misguided, without full and proper context, filled with omissions and less than accurate information” but wouldn’t specify what his concerns were when asked. He declined to comment on any specific cases.

Zbiegniewicz credited ProPublica’s investigation for the judge’s action in her case — an uncommon occurrence in New York’s troubled guardianship system. But she also noted it took years of sustained protest on her part, a level of persistence that many ailing and elderly New Yorkers in guardianship cannot manage.

“I’ve done what I could, I feel good about it, the judge heard, you wrote things,” she said. “Maybe somebody will see and maybe somewhere, down the line, somebody will do something about it.”

A state supreme court decision could boil down to an all-or-nothing gambit.

With its beautiful Stupp fountain, majestic marble columns, and iconic STL letters, St. Louisans today think of the Missouri History Museum’s North Lawn as a place for parties, picnics, and photo ops. While the entrance itself has always been an attractive and welcoming space, the area surrounding it has undergone significant changes and upgrades since …

Continue reading "Making a Grand Entrance: The Missouri History Museum’s North Lawn"