My Son Claimed I Had Early Onset Dementia To Take Over My Assets. I Just Found Out He’s Been Swapping My Blood Pressure Meds To Make Me Confused. Should I File A Police Report Against My Own Child?

The Medication Deception

That night I couldn’t sleep. I lay in Linda’s guest room staring at the ceiling, trying to understand how this had happened. How my son—the baby boy I’d rocked to sleep, the teenager I’d helped with homework, the man I’d comforted through his divorce—could do this to me.

And then I remembered something. Two months ago, I’d been feeling dizzy, lightheaded. Brian had been concerned, insisted I see a doctor.

But when I tried to make an appointment, I found out my health insurance had been cancelled.

“That’s odd,” Brian had said when I told him. “Let me look into it.”

A week later, he’d told me it was all fixed, a clerical error. But what if it wasn’t? What if he’d cancelled my insurance deliberately? What if the dizziness had been caused by something else?

I got up and turned on the light. In my purse, I found my medication bottles: three prescriptions I took daily for blood pressure and cholesterol.

I looked at the labels. The pharmacy was one I didn’t recognize. The prescribing doctor was someone named Dr. Patricia Holmes. I’d never heard of her.

I called Linda into the room. “Do you know a doctor Patricia Holmes?”

Linda looked at the bottles and frowned. “No. Who’s your regular doctor?”

“Dr. Reeves at Portland Medical. I’ve been seeing him for 20 years.”

“Then why are these prescribed by someone else?”

We looked at each other, and I knew. Brian had been controlling my medication too. Giving me something that made me dizzy, confused, making me seem incompetent.

Legal Action

The next morning, Linda and I went straight to a law office. The receptionist tried to tell us they were booked, but Linda, in her most authoritative librarian voice, said, “This is an emergency involving elder financial abuse, and we need to speak to someone immediately.”

20 minutes later, we were sitting across from an attorney named Sarah Mitchell. She was younger than I expected, maybe 40, with dark hair pulled back and sharp eyes.

I showed her everything: the refinance documents, the bank statements, the medication bottles, the email from Vanessa. Sarah listened without interrupting.

When I finished, she was quiet for a moment. “Mrs. Chen,” she finally said. “This is one of the most systematic cases of elder financial abuse I’ve seen. And you found it just in time. If that refinance had gone through, they could have taken another $500,000.”

“Combined with what they’ve already stolen, you’d have lost everything.”

“What do I do?”

“First, we revoke the power of attorney immediately. I’ll draft the documents right now. Second, we file a police report. This is criminal fraud. Third, we freeze all accounts they might have access to and start the process of recovery.”

“Fourth,” she paused. “Fourth, you need to understand. This will get ugly. Brian is your son.”

“This will destroy your relationship.”

“He destroyed it when he forged my signature.”

Sarah nodded. “Okay. Then let’s get to work.”

The next week was a blur of paperwork, police stations, and phone calls. The detective assigned to my case was a woman named Rodriguez. She was thorough and kind, and when she arrested Brian and Vanessa, she made sure I wasn’t there to see it.

But I read the police report later. They’d been living far beyond their means. Brian’s real estate business was underwater, hemorrhaging money.

He’d made bad investments, gambled on properties that didn’t sell. Vanessa had expensive tastes and credit card debt from her previous marriage. Together, they’d burned through hundreds of thousands of dollars.

And when that wasn’t enough, they decided to take mine.

“She Won’t Remember in a Year”

The refinance was just the beginning. If it had succeeded, they planned to convince me to sell the house entirely, move me into assisted living—which really meant a cheap facility where I’d be medicated into compliance.

Then they’d sell everything else, pocket the money, and disappear. There were emails between them.

Vanessa had written: “Once we have the refinance money, we can keep her confused with the meds. Maybe six more months and we can start the dementia narrative, then conservatorship, and it’s all ours.”

Brian had replied: “I feel bad about this.”

And Vanessa: “Don’t. She’s old. She won’t remember any of it in a year anyway. This is our future we’re talking about.”

I read those emails in Sarah’s office and felt something break inside me. Not my heart—that had broken already—but something deeper.

The last thread of hope that maybe Brian had been coerced, manipulated, forced into this by Vanessa. But he hadn’t been. He’d chosen this. Chosen money over his mother.

The trial was set for six months later. In the meantime, Sarah worked to recover what she could. Bank accounts were traced, transactions were reversed, the house refinance was cancelled.

Slowly, my money started coming back. But not all of it. Brian and Vanessa had spent over $300,000. Gone on gambling, shopping, a down payment on a condo in Hawaii they’d planned to move to once I was out of the way.

That money was unrecoverable.