Napa County District Attorney Gary Lieberstein has heard stories from the state parole system, stories where parole officers tell convicts that home caregiving is a promising field for gainful employment.

“I don’t think they would suggest they do it because they wanted to see someone ripped off,” he said. “I’d imagine it’s because parolees can get the work without a lot of background checking.”

In response to stories like that, a local group of elder advocates is launching a first-of-its kind campaign to urge Napa County and it’s cities to become part of a program requiring home caregivers be fingerprinted and subject to FBI background checks. Each jurisdiction would have to pass its own version of the permit.

While some home health aide agencies do background checks at the local courthouse to try and protect their customers, people with criminal backgrounds can slip past those checks if they come from outside the county or state.

What happens too often, elder advocates say, is that people like Comeliner Hunter, a Vallejo woman who had prior convictions for grand theft before she became a home caregiver, gain access to an elder and take advantage.

According to court records, Hunter pleaded no contest in 2004 to stealing a blank check belonging to an 83-year-old Napa woman. Hunter, who was the woman’s caretaker, used the check to pay her rent.

Hunter was sentenced to two years in state prison.

Under existing home caregiver rules, Hunter could be right back in business with her disabled clients unaware of her past behavior.

Going to the cities

Elder advocates including Betty Rhodes of the Napa County Commission on Aging and Terri Restelli-Deits, planner with the Napa-Solano Area Agency on Aging, have teamed up to promote a permit process throughout the county.

“(Seniors) really do need to be educated,” Rhodes said. “They're not safe unless they take precautions. If caregivers come from an agency, the agency will say they’ve all been checked but they might not have been fingerprinted.”

The plan is to require caregivers to obtain a permit, requiring they be fingerprinted for an FBI background check, their employment history for the last five years and proof they have a good driving record through the Department of Motor Vehicles.

County supervisors gave elder advocates permission Tuesday to take their story on the road to Napa’s five cities. Rhodes said the group plans to hit all five mayors with a presentation at once during a June meeting of the Napa County Transportation and Planning Agency.

The initiative comes after U.S. Census data showed 16 percent of Napa County’s population is age 65 or older, and the percentage of seniors is expected to double by 2030. Napa County also has the second-largest percentage of people age 85 and older in the state.

Restelli-Deits said as the population of elders rises, so will incidents of elder abuse.

Such crimes have received growing attention in recent years from local authorities. In 2001, Lieberstein created an elder abuse prosecution unit, now staffed full-time by Deputy District Attorney Bryan Tong and elder abuse investigator A.C. Fields. In 2005 elder advocates teamed with the district attorney’s office to form a group to increase monitoring of elder deaths and training financial institutions in what to look out for with financial scams directed at seniors.

The same year, elder advocates began pushing for governments to anticipate the coming wave of elders by opening up access to health programs for baby boomers and investing in elder-friendly mass transportation.

“Elder abuse today is probably where domestic violence was 20 or 30 years ago,” Lieberstein said. “We still have a long way to go to educate our community.”

Tong said although most victims of elder abuse are victimized by a family member, seniors most at risk of being abused by a home caregiver are those cut off from normal family and friend contacts.

“The people with no family and the widows, those are the people who are most vulnerable,” he said, adding about one-third of all the financial elder abuse cases he sees involve a home caregiver.

Fields said the elder advocates’ proposal will be crucial to preventing the wrong people from doing the wrong job in the first place.

“At least this is one more tool the elderly will have to make the right decisions,” he said.