Fighting for Doc: Part 4: After the Fall 

Posted: 8:59 pm Wed, November 18, 2009
By Caryn Tamber
Daily Record Legal Affairs Writer

For years after he lost his wife, Doc McQuaid maintained to his friends and family that nothing was wrong at home.

The façade began to crack in 2009.

On Jan. 14, McQuaid broke his neck. He told his middle daughter, Judy DeMott, that he fell out of bed.

To one of the doctors who treated him later, though, he added that his houseguests were stealing from him and that he was going to kick them out.

As it turned out, the doctor was one of the few who would talk to McQuaid’s youngest daughter, Mary Jewell, about his care. The doctor also tried to counsel McQuaid about elder abuse; but even then, McQuaid didn’t want to hear it, Jewell said.

An old friend and neighbor, Harold Lloyd, said McQuaid called him after the accident for the first time in months.

“He said they — the nebulous ‘they’ — he said they had stolen his ATM card,” Lloyd said. “Several of his cars had been wrecked, but it’s that nebulous ‘they.’ He’s always protecting these awful people.”

McQuaid told Lloyd that he was having financial problems and could pay some but not all of his bills.

Lloyd, who is 83, said he stopped coming by McQuaid’s house years ago because he was scared of the people who lived there. But the last time he spoke to McQuaid, he told him to call if he needed help.

“I told him if he needed me, I’d be over there in a minute,” Lloyd said.

A criminal defense lawyer who used to represent one of McQuaid’s houseguests, Darla Mundy, said McQuaid also called him around March or April.

McQuaid told him that Mundy had taken his car again.

The lawyer spoke on the condition that his name not be used because he was hesitant to talk publicly about a former client.

Like all the attorneys McQuaid had hired to represent his houseguests in their criminal cases, the lawyer had been contacted by Mary Jewell in her quest to stop her father from being exploited. And in fact, the lawyer had refused to take cases in which Mundy was accused of taking things from McQuaid.

After McQuaid’s call, he drove up to the house in Parkton. There, he found McQuaid, bedridden, with a “caretaker” who was not Mundy or anyone else the lawyer recognized.

The lawyer said the house was in a shambles, strewn with clothes, trash and even what looked like bottles of urine.

“When I went upstairs and saw the mess the tenants had made,” he said, “I was nauseated.”

He told the caretaker to clean up the place and told McQuaid to call the police about Mundy — “and be prepared to prosecute,” he said.

“Please call your daughter,” he told McQuaid.

‘We’ll never know’

McQuaid fell again July 9, 2009, and was treated and released from the hospital.

Two days later, he spoke to Judy DeMott at her home in Florida. He told her he was in a lot of pain, and she warned him not to get up.

Later that day, he fell for the last time.

He had broken his neck again. DeMott said her father couldn’t move his arms, so he wasn’t able to hit his Link to Life medical alarm.

He yelled for his houseguest, Crystal Overfield, for three hours, and when she finally came downstairs, she called 911, DeMott said McQuaid told her.

At the R Adams Cowley Shock Trauma Center, McQuaid was talkative, Jewell said.

McQuaid had stopped talking to her four years earlier, after she tipped police to drug activity in his house and contacted the MVA about revoking his license.

At Shock Trauma, though, he admitted he was living way beyond his means and was broke, Jewell said.

He told her he had no credit cards, had lost his nursing home insurance for nonpayment, and was taking out a reverse mortgage on his house.

When Jewell and her oldest sister, Jeanne Cox, went to the house while McQuaid was hospitalized, they found a mess.

A reporter invited by Jewell at the time saw clothing strewn on every surface and plates of crumbs and half-eaten food throughout the house. There were several drops of what looked like blood in the kitchen, where McQuaid told his daughters he fell. There was an overpowering smell of cat urine.

The basement, Jewell and Cox said, was full of fleas.

They got the locks changed on the house, prompting angry messages on Cox’s phone from Crystal Overfield — a houseguest with a criminal record in 12 states, according to one prosecutor. Although Overfield had left McQuaid’s house after a 2006 burglary conviction, she had returned by early 2009.

McQuaid’s daughters also asked the hospital staff not to let Overfield call or visit McQuaid. Once, hospital workers caught her in the hallway and escorted her out, Cox said.

The sisters also removed a loaded Winchester rifle from the house.

McQuaid underwent surgery about 10 days after the fall, and it didn’t go well. At first, the hospital planned to send him to rehabilitation and then to a nursing home, but after he deteriorated further, they decided to transfer him to a hospice.

At 1 a.m. on Aug. 3, just eight hours after he arrived at the hospice, Doc McQuaid died.

Jewell demanded an autopsy.

After the surgery, though, there was no way to tell whether McQuaid had fallen or whether there was foul play, Jewell said, and the doctor who performed the autopsy told her he was ruling the death accidental.

Jewell is still suspicious, and she can’t help but wonder at the coincidence of both of her parents dying of complications from neck injuries.

Cox said that the day before her mother died in September 2003, from her hospital bed she asked her oldest daughter, “Do you know what your father has done?”

Gloria McQuaid had a tendency to bring up decades-old slights. Cox assumed her mother wanted to complain about something Doc had done years ago, “and I shushed her,” she said.

Now, she wonders if her mother had been about to tell her that her father was already involved with the same group of people who ultimately moved in and took over.

“We’ll never know,” Cox said.

In debt

By the end of his life, the formerly tight-fisted McQuaid was deeply in debt.

According to Jewell, he had refinanced the Harris Mill property in 2006 and again in 2008, for $422,000, but was three months in default on that loan and the bank was starting to foreclose. The reverse mortgage he was talking about in the hospital would clear that debt, but as Jewell said, “The house was gone either way.”

She worries that after all of Doc McQuaid’s efforts at rural preservation, someone will buy his 20 acres and develop it.

McQuaid owed more than $13,000 to the IRS in penalties for his 2007 income taxes, and as far as Jewell can tell, he never filed a 2008 tax return.

He had gone through all of the money in his investment accounts, which Jewell estimated totaled more than $1 million.

He owed tens of thousands of dollars to M&T Bank, Allstate, Citibank, Chase Bank, AT&T and many smaller outfits, such as the lawn care service and the exterminator.

His last cell phone bill was $910.

In just under six years between his wife’s death and his own, McQuaid had purchased six cars. As near as Jewell can tell by sale and registration documents, two were for him, two for Darla Mundy, one for Crystal Overfield and one for Mundy’s teenage son.

Jewell found huge body shop bills for work on several of the cars, and one, a Toyota RAV4, was still at the shop needing $6,000 of work.

There was also a rental car signed out to McQuaid that the rental company had reported as stolen.

His own choices

For a long time, Mary Jewell thought that if she could just reach the right person at the right agency, someone would step in and stop the unfolding disaster.

She kept a detailed, annotated list of her contacts. Every time she put in another call, e-mail or letter, she hoped that this time, someone could help.

But in the end, no one could. Doc McQuaid was competent and not personally doing anything illegal, they told her. He was an adult who was free to make his own choices.

Jewell wonders what would have happened had someone else who saw what was going on reported it.

“It might have helped if there was someone other than me that was going to step forward,” Jewell said.

Jewell blames the doctors who saw him show up for appointments with his “caregivers” and didn’t report the situation, even after she had warned them by letter.

She blames the criminal defense lawyers who took case after case for which McQuaid was footing the bill.

She blames prosecutors in multiple jurisdictions, who she feels should have communicated better with one another and pieced together what was going on. Instead, she said, they repeatedly put McQuaid’s houseguests’ cases on the stet docket, dropped the charges or pleaded them down to offenses that didn’t carry jail time.

She blames Baltimore County Adult Protective Services, which found that no intervention was warranted even after an investigator saw the state of the house.

She blames the mortgage company, which sent someone to the house multiple times to inspect. The inspector should have called police or APS about the house, she said.

“This,” she said, “is a total failure of society.”