100-year-old’s apt. sale nixed
City flags plan to help her aide
Mi casa es su casa — unless the city has a problem with it.
Lawyers for the city’s Adult Protective Services have sued to block the sale of an elderly woman’s Manhattan co-op after learning she plans to take the proceeds and move in with her Brooklyn caretaker.
Florence Lee, who is 100 years old, grew so fond of her private home attendant that she was ready to sell her Upper West Side apartment and move in with Joy Ann RossWood and her family, who are currently in Crown Heights.
The plan, according to Lee’s attorney, was for Lee to use the money from the expected $1 million sale and help RossWood expand her own home. Court papers say Lee would continue paying her $1,300 weekly salary.
But the co-op sale came to a grinding halt after agency officials grew concerned that Lee was being scammed and could lose all of her assets.
Authorities argued in court papers that Lee did not have the mental capacity to make decisions on her own. The agency is suing to appoint a guardian on Lee’s behalf.
Officials suggested RossWood and Lee’s lawyer Samuel Weinbaum manipulated the elderly woman.
“Florence Lee has severe memory impairments and she is at imminent risk of financial exploitation,” a Human Resources Administration lawyer wrote.
An Adult Protective Services doctor who examined Lee said she has a major neurocognitive disorder due to possible Alzheimer’s disease.
But Weinbaum said she just has a need to be part of a loving family.
“She wanted to go live with her aide,” Weinbaum said. “The aide has a family that she likes to be around. She spends a lot of time at the aide’s apartment.”
Ross-Wood, 50, a mother of five from Guyana, said she became Lee’s round-the-clock aide after the elderly woman took a dislike to a nursing home.
When Ross-Wood would take breaks to visit with her family, Lee, who grew close to the brood during visits and gatherings, would get upset, Ross-Wood said. Lee told her she should “let your family come and live with me in this house,” according to RossWood. “I saidW, ` ell, my family’s big. We can’t live here,’ ” said the aide, who said Lee was “like family” to her husband and children.
Ross-Wood also told Lee she did not think the co-op board at the W. 66th St. building would allow such a move.
“And then she said, `Well, then let’s sell the place and buy a big house. Everybody could live under one roof,’ ” RossWood recalled.
But an agency psychiatrist who examined Lee said the patient could barely articulate how she knew Ross-Wood, and “believed she was an old friend,” according to court papers.
The Manhattan district attorney’s office declined to comment on whether the matter was under investigation.
A married couple was already in contract for Lee’s home — originally offering to pay $999,999 and later agreeing to an extra $40,000 when the board rejected the lower sum for the 1,000-square-foot apartment with a terrace and views of the Hudson River.
The couple’s lawyer wrote that Adam and Jennifer Wallach, who are buying the apartment, “are absolutely innocent bystanders” who “believe Ms. Lee was of sound mind when she signed the contract of sale.”
Ross-Wood admitted Lee, a former lawyer, has cognitive issues on occasion but said she has “good days” during which she is of sound mind.
Lee was taken from RossWood’s home in an ambulance earlier this month after protesting she was not ill and did not need to go, according to Ross-Wood and Lee’s cousin Yvonne Adams, who she was on the phone with when authorities arrived.
Weinbaum now believes she is at a nursing home. Ross-Wood and Weinbaum have not been able to speak to her.
Ross-Wood, who choked up talking about her elderly employer, said Lee needs to be surrounded by people who care.
“I swear (with) the house and all this confusion — it doesn’t matter to me anymore. That wasn’t my decision, that was Florence’s,” she said.
“I just want her to be well taken care of and be happy.”