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Friday, October 22, 2010
Love Wrenched Apart by Illness, Family Feud
By Joline Gutierrez Krueger
Journal Staff Writer
Robert Ray Quinton remembers cradling his wife's fragile, fevered head in his hands and gazing into her eyes filled with something resembling sadness, resignation, recognition, love.
"She knew she was dying," he said. "I knew what she was thinking. I knew what she wanted to tell me."
Everybody had told him she was in a persistent vegetative state since the cardiac arrest last year. But he hadn't believed it. She was getting better, he thought. She could communicate with blinks and stares and gentle movements. Recently, he said, she was trying to talk again.
The pneumonia that had put her in the hospital last Sunday surely wasn't enough to take her from him. Doctors, he said, had assured him of that.
And, yet, it was enough.
She said goodbye with her eyes. Then, he said goodbye.
In the dark emptiness of Tuesday morning, he knew before he answered the phone that she was gone.
But in many ways, Nancy Hentel-Quinton, 71, had been taken from him months before, not just by her impaired state but by the nightmarish situation that resulted when a judge, his wife's relatives and a costly corporate care agency decided that they, not he, knew what was best for the woman he had loved for 27 years.
You might remember the Quintons from my July 19 column. After she was stricken, Quinton said, his wife's son and her sister made good on their long-standing disdain for him and conspired to boot him from what remained of her life.
Nonsense, said Nancy's sister, Prudence Stewart, who said that she felt compelled to step in when she learned Quinton was not paying her sister's nursing home bills — a charge Quinton denies.
Whatever she did, she said, was out of love and concern for her sister's care, which had been compromised by Quinton's bizarre behaviors and unwillingness to accept help, even though his own physical and mental health at age 80 was precarious.
She listed a litany of claims Quinton had made over the years about numerous doctoral degrees, prestigious positions, inventions, adventures, secret missions done at the government's behest.
A court-ordered evaluation performed by Albuquerque psychologist Dr. Rex Swanda found Quinton to have delusional ideations both grandiose and persecutorial in nature.
"No one felt he was competent to make decisions," Stewart said.
Yet to Quinton's friends — and to me — he seemed lucid and cordial, though I could neither prove nor disprove any of his claims.
He was the eccentric scientist, Nancy the affable astrologer, who even naysayers admitted doted on him and believed in him implicitly.
"No family members have suggested that Nancy was unhappy in her marriage to Ray," a court-ordered conservator report stated. "Based on their lifestyle and anecdotal reports from family and friends, it appears that it was Nancy's intent to continue her life with Ray."
Last December, state District Judge Beatrice Brickhouse made the decision to take away Quinton's right to handle Nancy's care, awarding guardianship and conservatorship to Stewart and Kelly Nelson, Nancy's son by a previous marriage. Decades, an elder-care agency, was asked to serve as conservator soon afterward.
Quinton fought back until the money for a lawyer ran out.
On July 30, he fought back again, refusing to budge when the judge ordered him to move from the Academy Estates home he and Nancy had shared for 27 years.
Decades argued that Quinton had to be evicted so the agency could prepare the house for sale before it was foreclosed upon because the mortgage had not been paid for several months. They also argued that the house was Nancy's alone before the marriage anyway and that Quinton had signed away his rights to it in a sole and separate property agreement and conveyance in 1999.
Quinton contends the mortgage was being paid up until Decades assumed the financial duties.
"Everything was fine before they came," he said.
Brickhouse also ordered Quinton's firearms be removed over safety concerns.
"Quinton has repeatedly stated that he will take all actions necessary to ensure that Decades personnel and other individuals pay for 'stealing' Nancy's property and 'orchestrating' her death," Decades' motion says.
Stewart and Decades officials insist they tried to work with Quinton, offering a $700 allowance from Nancy's estate plus moving expenses and a deposit on an apartment, but he had refused to cooperate.
Quinton said that's because he didn't need their help.
"We would have done just fine if everybody had left us alone," he said. "Nancy would be home and alive if they had."
Last week, Quinton, whose calcified back has left him reliant on wheelchairs and walkers, was ordered out of the house, allowed to take little more than the clothes on his back.
"He couldn't bring his medications, clothing, razor, phone charger, laptop, nothing," said Tania Guerra, who serves as his private advocate.
Decades paid for a few days' stay at a La Quinta off I-25. That money has since run out. The conservator report says that Quinton receives about $2,000 a month from a federal pension and social security.
"Nobody wanted Ray out on the street," Stewart said. "It just could have been so different had Ray cooperated, had he taken care of Nancy first instead of himself."
After Nancy's death Tuesday, Quinton saw his wife one last time — but only after hospital security checked him for weapons, Guerra said.
"I laughed. He's 80 years old with a walker. What's he going to do?" Guerra said. "That's how stupid and vindictive this has become."
Services for Nancy Hentel-Quinton are planned for 3 p.m. Saturday at French Mortuary, 10500 Lomas NE.
For now, Quinton is focused on trying to find an attorney willing to take his case, trying to find a way to get back 27 years of whatever community property laws will permit, trying to find a way to go home.
"I have nothing now," he said.
Nancy would probably have something to say about that.
UpFront is a daily front-page news and opinion column. Joline Gutierrez Krueger can be reached at 823-3603 or jkrueger@abqjournal.com, or she can be followed on Twitter @ jolinegkg.
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