WHAT HAPPENED TO
NANCY?
One day, in November of 2001, Nancy Golin merely wandered off from her parents, in the blink of an eye. Her parents reported her disappearance within a few minutes to police and went out all night with police searching for her, fearing abduction. Police were unable to find her, but when she found her way back the next morning on her own no worse for wear to her utter delight and that of her parents, police decided to tell her parents they were merely sending her to the hospital for a welfare check, but then instead locked her up in a Stanford psych ward for mental patients where she was severely abused and injured, and suffered medical malpractice.
Psych doctors, misguided by police and deprived of her medical history, slashed her anti-seizure medications sending her into a severe bout of seizures. A neurology consult was called that restored her medication to the right levels that the parents had been administering under her regular neurologist's supervision. When the hospital discovered its mistake and could find nothing wrong with her and wanted to discharge her, that she had been in good condition and didn't belong in a psych ward, she should have been allowed to return home, but the state officials that harmed her and violated her rights decided instead to cover up their misdeeds for fear of a lawsuit and to justify their mistake. Nancy was never again allowed to return home to her family. Right before she was discharged from Stanford Hospital psychiatric ward, where Nancy had been reported climbing into the beds of other patients and eating off their dishes, there was an event so serious that three days of hospital records disappeared and a panic meeting by phone occurred between Risk Management, the police, SARC and APS officials. Because the laws do not allow the state to simply grab someone off the street and put them away unless there is some possible form of treatment, there was no legal way to keep holding her. Local officials confessed on record that they "wished to avoid court if at all possible", because they might lose. State lawyers declined to secretly push through an immediate petition to conserve Nancy, advising local officials to get the DA to find something to charge the parents with instead.
Determined to keep holding her anyway in spite of the law, state officials conspired with the local DA's office to have the parents maliciously prosecuted on trumped up charges, and spirited her away to a secret state hideout as if she had been abandoned, and forged her name to consent papers. Even the newspapers couldn't find her. From there the state's legal liability problems went from bad to worse and the cover-up merely intensified at each step in response.
When the police saw the articles in the Palo Alto Daily News, Regional Center and APS officials panicked and faxed false and slanderous misinformation about the parents to the newspaper, trying to portray them as career criminals, even going so far as the bizarre claim that Mrs. Golin had once committed an assault on a police officer. APS's Chief Jamie Buckmaster even invented fictional witnesses in her official records making deplorable allegations that they had had conversations with Nancy only a few years ago [implying she was developmentally disabled due to abuse] Buckmaster apparently has concocted other lies too; a newspaper reporter told us that Buckmaster had told her we'd locked Nancy in a closet!. The reporter at the Daily News told the parents that she was naturally shocked at hearing that Nancy had been kept locked in a closet when she was little (but not as shocked as the parents were when they heard this outrageous lie for the first time), and refused to hear them when they told her that it was a pure fantasy, and that there was absolutely no evidence to support such a lie, because it never happened. The parents later discovered that a social worker that they had never heard of named Talia Shire had written this in the APS records and there it remained without any refutation. The mere fact that a corrupt official said it was true and wrote it in their records was enough to convict the parents in this reporter's mind, and she refused to print any more sympathetic stories.
They then used this to have the Golins falsely arrested on $50k felony
warrants, trying to shut them up and incapacitate them. They were both charged
with felony dependent adult abuse.
Nancy was thus effectively kidnapped under color of law by state
officials. The parents were held overnight before they made bail. After Mrs. Golin was bailed out they
still refused to release her, rushing a nurse to the jail, summoned by a
prominent local attorney at the jail well known in probate court, to try to
have her held further on a psychiatric evaluation, claiming that she was
gravely disabled and unable to care for herself despite her obvious assets,
claiming her disclosure of a recent small inheritance from her father was
merely a delusional belief challenging her to disclose where she kept her cash,
what bank accounts she used, to "prove" that she was not delusional.
When Mrs. Golin wisely refused to reveal this, several guards suddenly jumped
her and put her in shackles, leg irons and chains and marched her back and
forth all night, while her blood pressure shot up to 200/120. Finally a psychiatrist
examined her the next day and found her quite rational and she was released,
and the parents went back to work on a contract they had started. Upon being released
she found that $2,000 in cash she had on her when she was taken into custody
was gone.
The parents' doctor Jerold
Kaplan wrote a letter which was sent to the DA (page 1, page 2) explaining
that there were no grounds for any such claim of abuse but it was abuse to
separate her from her parents, but the DA still refused to drop the charges for over 14 month, to help
the state disqualify her parents as conservators. The state proceeded in secret
to apply for conservatorship of Nancy without telling her parents, claiming
they could not find them because supposedly they were in jail for abusing her,
even though they knew the parents were seeing her every week. Four months into
secret conservatorship proceedings the probate court ordered the state officials
to find the parents and serve them. The alerted parents fought back and filed
their own petition to conserve her in opposition. Fourteen months after Nancy
was snatched by the state, the DA admitted he had no case when he couldn't
specify any charges and the parents were fully exonerated just before their
criminal trial was set to begin.
In the
meantime, the criminal court at the request of State officials had ordered that
the parents could only see Nancy one hour a week under close supervison, fearing
that lack of supervision might lead to damaging discoveries, and preferring to
maintain the appearance that the parents were somehow dangerous to her without
explaining how. When the parents first saw her after she was taken away she
looked heavily drugged and molested.
The state officials refused to tell
the parents anything and oddly this most conspicuous behavior was always ignored
in psych notes. When the parents tried to report the signs of abuse to the DA,
and he announced an inspection to see her, her caregivers attempted to subject
her to "behavior modification" to stop her from exhibiting the
incriminating behavior before the DA could see it, and things went out of control. Nancy was severely injured and later it was
found that her collarbone was broken and not reported or treated, exactly that
same time period estimated by orthopedic expert Nguyen, when the parents saw
her with her left shoulder and arm twisted. Abuse in state care is not reported,
because APS and CPS, the agencies responsible
for overseeing reporting of abuse in parental care, actually work with police
to prevent such reports when in state care, in a conspiracy of
silence akin to prison guards. Nancy repeatedly begged her parents to take her
home with them by trying to pull them out the door with her or selecting her
father's car key out of his pocket and giving it to him, as she had always done
to ask to be taken out.
Meanwhile,
Nancy was severely abused and injured in state care, making it even harder for
the state to let her go because of their fear of a lawsuit, and their greed. An
unprofessional temporary conservator was appointed, who ended up doing more
harm than good, even though the extent of Nancy's abuse and injuries came to
light. Finally the parents were exonerated of criminal charges, but instead of
letting Nancy go home, the state insisted on staging a trial in probate
court to try to whitewash their liability, and they took temporary conservatorship
of her meanwhile and put her back on the lethal psych drugs. They warehoused
her in the same abusive home where she had already suffered, appointed an adversarial
public defender who acted as a prosecutor, not a defender, to railroad her and
fend off a jury trial, and the drugs immediately caused her to have terrible
seizures which ended up putting her in the hospital in grave condition. The probate court helped cover up her
serious condition, in league with the state. The court would not permit the
parents to get rid of her and hire a private
attorney to represent Nancy honestly, even though they could afford it.
Before all this happened, in June of 2001 while
Nancy was still living at home, during a stay at Alta Bates hospital for an unrelated problem,
it had been discovered that Nancy had a mild hiatal hernia and esophageal damage requiring treatment. This finally uncovered
the root cause for so many prior ER visits to Stanford that Stanford ER doctors declined for years to
investigate.
Her mother followed the treatment and the condition reversed so well
that it could not be detected by a state doctor in 2002 after Nancy was
snatched by the State. This state doctor was not allowed by SARC to have
Nancy's past medical records and so did not realize the necessity of continuing
to treat it, and subsequently the condition grew much worse.
Her old GI problem, untreated in state care, was further seriously
aggravated by the State's routine use of the psychiatric medications such as Risperdal and Zyprexa, medications that Nancy had never had
before when she was living at home and didn't need because they are FDA listed for schizophrenia only and not for developmental
disability. Caregivers liked them because it made her easier to watch when
ordinarily lively Nancy was kept in a comatose state locked in her room at the
state's hideout. Caregivers brought her to a psychiatrist Dr. Hector Cerezo
lying about her behavior to get her prescribed on these drugs, misinforming him
that there was supposedly no medical history on her [to cover up Nancy's past
history of excellent care] because the parents were supposedly in jail for
abusing her [her parents were seeing her every week and had never abused her
and were not in jail] and that she had been prescribed such medications before
[also not true]. Use of these medications are specifically cautioned against by
the drug manufacturers when a person, like Nancy, has a pre-existing seizure
condition, because as her psychiatrist Cerezo testified at trial they
"lower seizure thresholds", meaning that her seizures are much harder
to control under medication. But home aides "forgot" to tell Cerezo
that she had a seizure condition and was taking Phenobarbital and Dilantin, both interferences for Risperdal
because they wanted the drugs.
Thus her seizure episodes on psychiatric drugs administered at her
aides discretion became out of control. The explosive internal pressures of the resulting
convulsions caused bleeding rips in her lower esophagus, made her hiatal
hernia much worse, and caused her to throw up blood and her esophageal lining,
and caused gastric reflux disorder which ordinarily quickly leads to cancer.
To cover up what was happening rather than take her to the hospital, the
state conservators ordered the terrified
home aides to deny her emergency treatment, even after she was turning blue and close to death.
Then they covered up the records of emergency hospitalizations putting her in various hospitals in secret
without notifying her parents, in order to limit their civil and criminal exposure.
About that same time Nancy was taken to an ER for a skull fracture and
broken thigh. When legal subpoenas were issued to obtain discovery of her
condition, public defender Street, who was supposedly representing Nancy,
called around directing everyone not to comply with revelations of state abuse
of her client using the excuse of privacy, and successfully fought to
have the parents' motions to compel discovery quashed by the probate court,
even when the parents showed that she was in grave condition and injured due to
the drugging. Street sought to make the parents sound crazy and impair their
credibility to the court for actually knowing more than ordinary knowledge
about these disorders, citing the fact that they were not doctors and therefore
were not permitted to know anything about them. The parents merely had studied
them on their own and knew the consequences of these disorders. The state
doctors were ordered not to talk to anyone about her condition. Poor Nancy cannot
speak or complain and is thus a perfect victim of state abuse. Anyone else but
the state would have been easily prosecuted criminally for this abuse.
A probate trial was finally held to determine
whether the parents or the state should conserve Nancy, and the parents found themselves
confronted with the full panoply of state power and manipulation. The parents
were denied their statutory and constitutional family preference. They were denied discovery,
with the state maintaining a stranglehold on the evidence and access to Nancy. The parents didn't have an attorney.
The judge kept out evidence and witnesses. The parents were forced to go up
against a high powered corporate defense attorney. Their demand for a jury
trial was denied. The judge kept cutting off testimony. Witnesses and evidence
was kept out. The judge said Nancy's
collarbone really wasn't broken and her arm wasn't really out of its socket in
the x-rays even though the orthopedic expert said it was and the x-rays show it so
clearly that even a lay person can see it. He said that a black eye and cut on
her eyelid seen on a visit "didn't rise to the level of abuse" in
state care! He would not let her GI doctor testify because if he had it would
have revealed that Nancy now had a lifethreatening esophageal disorder due to
state medical incompetence and drugging. A MediCal billing for an ER visit for a skull fracture and broken
femur was left unexplained, during a two month period when visits were
"coincidentally" curtailed. The transcripts were doctored taking out
anything damaging to the state case or helpful to the parents on appeal. It was
not a fair trial.
Despite the parents
excellent efforts at holding their own and impeaching state witnesses, defending themselves and
incriminating the state with hard evidence, favorable witnesses and solid legal
arguments, the probate court
ignored their testimony, demonstrating its institutional bias and appointed the
same state agents who had so severely abused Nancy as her conservator. The
court whitewashed what the state had done and reached preposterous findings of
supposed "abuse and neglect" that never happened against the parents
that defied all reason and the admitted evidence. Judge William F. Martin riddled
Mrs. Golin with contempt for her "lofty standards" for doctors, and
for knowing more than she was supposed to without having gotten a medical degree, her interest in alternative medical
approaches, for her supposed distrust of conventional authority and an imagined
inability to get along with doctors, for informing herself about drug reactions
and treatments on the Internet, all ridiculous distortions of reality. The
parents were only able to see their daughter for a few short hours and supervised
visitation was imposed despite the absence of any statutory or case authority
in probate for to support it. The parents applied to the probate court for a
rehearing showing evidence from the trial and were ignored. They attempted to
challenge the judge peremptorily and for bias and were defeated.
The parents
appealed in state court but their appeal was headed off before the state appeals court ever
saw any evidence or briefs, and the California Supreme Court denied review.
They went to the US Supreme Court which denied certiorari. They went to the
federal court for a writ of habeas corpus but they were denied standing to
represent their own daughter. They appealed that decision to the US Circuit
Court, Ninth Circuit, and lost because they were unable to get the Certificate
of Appealability that the Congress has now imposed since the Habeas
"reform" laws of 1998, designed to make it harder for terrorists and
murderers to get a writ of habeas corpus in federal court. They appealed that
to the US Supreme Court at the same time and lost their bid for certiorari.
VIDEO
#1: Watch a
video of very disappointed Nancy having to be pried out by her parents from
their van to be returned to her group home at the end of a very happy visit. She thought they had come to rescue her again, and
this time finally take her home. Nancy tries so hard to please her parents so
that they will take her home, not understanding why they fail to rescue her.
Don't they love her anymore? The parents are shown here being forced to appear
to reject Nancy, and participate in infliction of emotional distress of a
daughter they have always been kind to before, over and over. Judge Martin was
shown this video and it had no effect on him.
VIDEO #2: Watch a video of Nancy
displaying constant involuntary rhythmic lip movements clearly displaying signs
of deadly tardive dyskinesia from drugging in 2002. She also
had tremors and lip thrusting. It also shows her obsessively tying and untying her
shoelaces, slowly being
driven crazy. Judge Martin was shown this video and said he didn't see any
signs of this condition. Can you see it? The psychiatrist Hector Cerezo
who prescribed this when her caregivers misinformed him about Nancy's history, when informed of it, exclaimed, "Oh my God, nobody told me about that, get her off that stuff right away". He testified at
trial that failure to do so might result in death or permanent disability. She
was removed from it for two months, after which the state took temporary conservatorship
on 2/4/03 on the excuse by Public Defender Malorie Street that she needed to be
put back on those drugs for her supposed benefit. Two weeks later on 2/20/03 she was in the hospital in serious
condition resulting from these drugs, and again a week after that on 3/1/03.
Then the state covered up these events and denied discovery, again supported by
Nancy's court appointed "attorney".
VIDEO #3: Another video showing involuntary lip pursing.
Page last updated 12/20/10