Boarding Home Records Lead To Grandmother

By KAREN BRANCH-BRIOSO The Tampa Tribune

Published: Oct 7, 2007

TAMPA - During August's record-breaking heat, 18 elderly and disabled people, packed as many as six to a room, were rescued from the Daphne Jones Boarding Home.

They had been without air conditioning for two days in windowless ground-floor rooms of the West Tampa building.

Tampa police arrested the home's operator, 36-year-old Daphne Jones, who is to be arraigned next week on 18 counts of adult abuse.

Jones, who has entered a written plea of not guilty, doesn't own the boarding home at 2347 W. Beach St.

She didn't hold the state license that allowed it to operate.

And the Social Security checks for residents unable to handle their own finances - such as disabled resident Debbie Gillis - were written to someone other than Jones.

The owner, the license-holder and the Social Security payee are all the same: Katie Jorden, Jones' 70-year-old grandmother. Jorden, whom many residents said they never met, has left an extensive paper trail in public records, but the degree of her involvement in her granddaughter's affairs is somewhat a mystery.

Jones' recent turbulent finances offer some clues. Those include a 2002 guilty plea to Social Security benefits fraud that may have kept her from becoming the payee for any of her boarding home residents.

"I was always under the impression all of this time that Daphne was the payee," said Maureen Gillis, Debbie's mother. She found otherwise when the administrator at Bay Gardens Retirement Center, which took in Debbie and several other ex-residents of the boarding home, went to the Social Security office to switch Debbie's paperwork - and found Jorden's name instead.

"I was not aware that [Daphne] had made her grandmother Debbie's payee until she was put into Bay Gardens."

In all, four ex-boarders had signed over their Social Security checks to a single person, said Elsa Thomas, administrator at Bay Gardens. Citing privacy issues, she declined to name the boarders or the payee. Maureen Gillis said Thomas told her Jorden was her daughter's payee.

Jorden, who lives in rural Hardee County, politely declined to discuss with a reporter why she figures so prominently in her granddaughter's business dealings.

"I understand," the bespectacled, soft-spoken Jorden said. "But I have no comment."

A Study In Contrasts

Jorden's modest surroundings in the tiny farming town of Ona contrast significantly with her dealings in Hillsborough County. For decades, she and her husband have operated a migrant labor camp in the front yard of their simple home, next to the railroad tracks. She and her husband, Jimmie, live there, but their son, Eddie, owns it - because the couple were steeped in IRS liens when the family bought the place.

In 1982, the IRS seized the couple's property in Wimauma to pay off similar liens.

Consider the contrast with the interests she has acquired in recent years in Hillsborough:

•Jorden owns the building that housed both the boarding home and Jones' hair salon. And she is the state license-holder for the Daphne Jones Boarding Home.

•She owns the 2003 pewter Hummer that Jones drives.

•Jorden owns the $585,000 riverfront house near Temple Terrace where Jones lives, and she is a corporate director for the adult family care home that Jones operated in the 4,475-square-foot house. Residents who lived there said they met Jorden in her Hardee County home when Jones went to visit her there - and they rarely, if ever, saw Jorden at the riverfront house.

Police, who are investigating the case, said Jones improperly moved several residents out of her posh house to the cramped West Tampa boarding home without notifying the state Agency for Health Care Administration. Her license allowed her to provide care for up to five elderly or disabled adults at her house.

Jones' attorney, Darryl Rouson, said his client is a misunderstood woman "whose heart is big, who has sought to help the downtrodden and those who society has put on the fringe - the people in nursing homes and assisted-living facilities. … I do not believe that all of these counts will stick."

Rouson said there is nothing untoward in Jorden's role in Jones' businesses. Jorden has no criminal record in Florida.

"White parents do this for their children all the time. They set up these shell things where it's in parents' names and kids' names. This is not anything new or novel what Miss Jorden has done," Rouson said.

"Katie Jorden is a wonderful grandmother who raised this young lady from almost 3 months old when the mother couldn't. These folks have very little formal education, and while it may appear at first glance that they are doing things that [one] would not logically in a formal sense do, they did what they had to do to get through what they had to do at the time."

Financial Trouble

Jorden's presence in her granddaughter's finances took its most profound turn during a series of personally tumultuous years for Jones.

It began just before Jones' husband - former Tampa Bay Devil Ray Kiki Jones - filed for divorce in 2001. The couple's finances crumbled during the bitter proceedings, with several of their properties facing foreclosure. They grappled over support payments for their severely disabled young son.

In 2002, Daphne Jones was indicted on charges she fraudulently collected $41,000 of Supplemental Security Income benefits for the child over the years. She pleaded guilty in 2002 to a misdemeanor count for failing to alert the Social Security Administration that she had worked as a hairdresser and owned several properties - which would have made her son ineligible for SSI. The program provides cash assistance to elderly, blind or disabled people with little or no income.

She received three months of home detention and had to pay back the $41,000.

A federal judge also sentenced her to two years' probation, banning her from making new credit charges, opening new lines of credit or making major purchases without her probation officer's consent.

From 2002 to 2004, she filed for bankruptcy four times.

During those financially turbulent years, Jorden stepped in several times, taking over ownership of her granddaughter's properties. First, in 2001, a few months before Jones' husband filed for divorce, Jones transferred the riverfront house she had just built at 5608 Puritan Road in a quit-claim deed to Jorden.

From 2003 to 2004, three additional properties owned by Jones were transferred to Jorden: an apartment building on Sligh Avenue, the Beach Street building that would later house the boarding home, and a vacant lot next door. The Puritan Road home and the Sligh Avenue and Beach Street buildings all were transferred briefly to Alonzo Barnes Jr., a financial services representative for New England Securities' Tampa office, before he switched them back to Jorden.

Barnes declined to comment. But the notary public who notarized most of the transactions, Judy Williams, said Jones' financial troubles were the reason she gave.

"I know Daphne owned some apartments and she had got behind and she quit-claimed to her grandmother, so her grandmother got [the payments] caught up so it wouldn't go into foreclosure," Williams said. "Daphne was doing hair, and the stuff she had - the house, the property - you cannot pay for that based on the income she was getting for hair. She had too much debt and not enough money."

In a December 2005 court document, Kiki Jones suggested a motive for the property shuffle to Jorden. He said he thinks Daphne Jones transferred the properties to keep him from getting any proceeds from them in a divorce settlement.

Kiki Jones did not respond to several requests for comment from the Tribune. After he failed to show for several hearings in the case, the judge dismissed all of his pleadings.

Mortgage After Mortgage

After Jorden took ownership of the properties, she started taking out mortgages. In May 2003, she took out a $58,000 mortgage on the Puritan Road house. She and her husband took out a $650,000 mortgage on the house in 2004. The year after that, the couple took out a $125,000 first mortgage on the West Tampa boarding home, and Jorden took out a second mortgage for $40,000 a few weeks after that.

Jones' grandparents also took out home-equity lines of credit on the Puritan Road house - first for $88,000 in 2006, expanding the line to $107,962 this year.

There's no record that the Jordens paid off those loans. But after her grandparents took out the mortgages, Jones paid off a $350,000 mortgage she had on the Puritan Road house. She also paid off a $242,998 mortgage that had gone into foreclosure on the boarding home property.

In recent years, Jorden - on paper - became substantially involved in her granddaughter's businesses as well. Jones' guilty plea and admissions that she lied about her income and assets to get her son SSI benefits could have affected her ability to become a Social Security payee for residents in her riverfront house or the boarding house.

"That would definitely be taken into consideration when we're looking at appointing a representative payee," said Social Security Administration spokeswoman Patti Patterson, who said she couldn't discuss Jones' case specifically. "If there's evidence of criminal behavior in the past - especially involving misuse of benefits - generally we would not appoint that person as a representative payee ever again."

In early 2006, Jorden applied for the state license to operate the Daphne Jones Boarding Home at the West Tampa building.

Late last year, Jorden became a corporate director of the adult family care home that Jones ran from the riverfront house.

After Jones' arrest, the state Agency for Health Care Administration investigated allegations that she moved residents from the four-bedroom house to the boarding home: "There is still a moratorium on admissions, and we are exploring all legal actions that may be available," agency spokeswoman Shelisha Durden said.

Jorden Is Like A Mother To Jones

Despite Jorden's role as director and payee for some of the residents, they rarely - if ever - saw her at the riverfront house or the boarding home, former residents said.

Linda Dill, 60, who lived in the riverfront house for several months before Jones moved them to the boarding home, said she met Jorden once - at her home in Ona.

Daphne "took a few of us to her grandmother's house," Dill said. "I believe she was taking her son over there so her grandmother could take care of him."

Dill and her roommate, Ruby Brewer, were among a handful of boarding home residents who first lived at Jones' riverfront house. They said their time there was pleasant, although Jones had them do chores. Dill said she swept, mopped and dusted.

Dill said she did far more after Jones moved the residents from the Puritan Road house to the crowded West Tampa boarding home. Dill, who came to live with Jones after a hospital stay for depression, said Jones asked her to distribute medicine to the other residents at the boarding home.

Brewer, 87, said her main task was to keep an eye on Jones' disabled son, Keith, who has cerebral palsy. Even after she was moved to the boarding home, she said Jones took her back to the Puritan Road house to watch the boy.

Brewer said she saw Jorden at the Puritan Road house only once - when she visited Jones after a shopping trip. She saw her a few more times when Jones drove the Hummer to visit Jorden in Ona and took Brewer along for the ride.

"The idea I got is her grandmother was like her mother," Brewer said, "because she talked to her about everything."

Jorden's son, Jimmie Jr., fathered Jones when he was 16. Rouson, the attorney, said Jones' biological mother suffered from addictions and couldn't care for her. So Jorden took over the role.

"She loves this girl," Rouson said. "She's cared for migrant workers. She's raised a whole bunch of other migrant workers' children."

Bill Staton met the Jordens even before they began renting the Ona labor camp from him in the mid-1980s, at a time when Staton ran a migrant labor camp. He met them when his and the Jordens' labor crews were harvesting peaches in South Carolina and Georgia. When he got out of the business, the family moved into his camp - and eventually bought it from him.

Some of the workers who live in the migrant housing unit on the property have been working with the Jordens for decades.

"They're older people. They've been with [Jimmie Jorden] for a long time. They've just grown old with him," Staton said. "They harvest watermelons. They pick oranges around here, cucumbers. They do watermelons and potatoes in North Carolina and Georgia."

When Staton first got out of the migrant labor business, he opened a used-car lot and sold several cars to the couple over the years. Katie Jorden made the payments, he said.

"She's a fine lady," Staton said. "Jimmie and his wife are some of the nicest people you'd ever want to meet."

Researcher Melanie Coon contributed to this report. Reporter Karen Branch-Brioso can be reached at (813) 259-7815 or kbranch-brioso@tampatrib.com.