by JC Hallman, Oklahoma Watch
July 28, 2025

In 2016, Ken Donley, then 73, set out for the Claremore Walmart to pick up some oil for his lawn tractor. Sometime later, Donley’s family — wife and two daughters — found him wandering confused in the Walmart parking lot not far from his truck, which he believed had been stolen.

He’d been gone for four hours.

Donley was a classic middle-American man. He met his future wife when they were 14 years old, and served four years in the Air Force as a communications specialist during the Vietnam War. He worked 30 years in the telecom industry, lost sight in one eye to an ocular stroke in 1981 and had a triple bypass in 2001, his daughter, Donna Donley, said.

Ken Donley retired a couple years later; that’s when he started to change.

“He wasn’t Dad,” Donna Donley, 54, said. “He used to joke around, but you just couldn’t joke with him anymore.”

The family brushed it aside for a long time, convinced themselves it was stress or that he was having hypoglycemic episodes because he was also diabetic. Even Ken Donley’s doctor — no spring chicken himself — missed the signs of Alzheimer’s, which was officially diagnosed in 2017.

Before then, the scene at Walmart was the final straw of a series of episodes that have become common for families across the country: misplaced belongings, confused directions on familiar roads. In the parking lot, Ken Donley was reduced to tears of frustration, and that made no sense at all.

“He was a guy who kicked butt and took names,” Donna Donley said.

The following year, the family took action, assigning durable power of attorney to Ken Donley’s wife, Ollie, and his two daughters.

“The powers granted by this document are broad and sweeping,” the document reads, specifying that Donley’s family could make health and medical care decisions for him, choose health providers and where he lived, and share his medical records as they saw fit.

Several years later, when Ken Donley needed to go to the emergency room at St. Francis Hospital, Donna Donley believed the durable power of attorney would protect him from whatever the hospital might try to do.

She was wrong.

An All-Too-Familiar Story

Donna Donley reached out to Oklahoma Watch after it told the story of Leroy Theodore, who became the subject of a still-ongoing guardianship battle when he was admitted to St. Francis in April. Theodore’s predicament in the eldercare system hints at the potential in Oklahoma for the sorts of guardianship abuses — hospitals and nursing homes seizing legal control of vulnerable adults, for financial gain — that have become a plague across the country and may worsen as the population ages.

Oklahoma’s elderly population is expected to increase by 21.3% by 2034, when for the first time, Oklahomans 65 and over will outnumber children.

Leroy Theodore’s story was all too familiar to Donna Donley.

Ken Donley outlived his wife, who died of congestive heart failure in October 2020; not long after, his personality took a darker turn.

“He was angry,” Donna Donley said. “I don’t think he knew what he was angry about.”

Donna and her sister, Dianna, continued to care for their father, even as he began to call them hurtful names and it became a struggle to get him into bed.

Then Ken Donley began to pull his daughters’ hair.

Another doctor recommended taking him to the emergency room at St. Francis because they had psychiatrists who could evaluate him.

Donna Donley checked him in at approximately 8 a.m. on May 1, 2021. At 2 p.m., after Donna almost fell out of her chair from exhaustion, the hospital told her to go home and wait for a call. They said they might check her father into Laureate, St. Francis’s adjacent psychiatric facility.

Donna Donley agreed, but her suspicions were raised.

“I knew it,” she said. “I had an inkling when they said psychiatric that I had better watch them. I knew!”

By 6 p.m., Ken Donley had been transferred to Laureate.

Source: A Harrowing Work Environment

“I thought this was a fluke,” Donna Donley said, reflecting on her father’s ultimate fate. “I thought it just happened to us.”

When she read Leroy Theodore’s story, she knew it wasn’t a fluke.

For its original story, Oklahoma Watch spoke to a source inside the hospital, an individual whose identity is known but who prefers to remain anonymous, fearing retaliation.

At that time, the source said court proceedings had been launched in as many as 15 cases.

Patients were sent to Laureate to make them easier to hide, the source said.

Now, the source says that seizures may be accelerating, including one as recent as July 10.

Furthermore, the source described a harrowing work atmosphere, amid rumors of mysterious changes afoot at St. Francis.

Employees are afraid to talk to one another because they’re not sure who they can trust, the source said. Patient meal portions are being cut by a third, and employee retirement account contributions have been trimmed and raises linked to performance evaluations.

Doctors and staff are leaving — as many as 10 at a time — because they have been asked to do things they don’t want to do, the source said.

As to St. Francis’s adjacent psychiatric facility — which recently announced an expansion from 45 to 60 beds — the source did not hesitate.

“You don’t want to go to Laureate, because you’ll be disappeared,” the source said.

As with Oklahoma Watch’s original story, St. Francis Health System Corporate Communications facilitator Lynn Casey, who in 2020 left a career as a news anchor at KOKI-TV, did not respond to a request for comment on the case of Ken Donley or recent changes at the hospital.

A Growing Issue Nationwide

Alzheimer’s is not a psychiatric condition. Nevertheless, Ken Donley was sent to Laureate, and while he was there, it was as though he had vanished.

Donna Donley wouldn’t see her father for five days; visits were prohibited, and even phone calls required leaps through extra bureaucratic hoops, she said.

Eventually, Ken Donley was expelled back to St. Francis with mysterious marks on his ankles and wrists.

Donna Donley’s fears that something was amiss were affirmed on her father’s first night in Laureate, when she received a call saying that her durable power of attorney wasn’t enough. The hospital would file a mental health petition.

Oklahoma Watch’s St. Francis source said that mental health petitions — which can be used to pursue involuntary commitment — are arguably even worse than guardianship.

“It’s effectively the same thing, but it seems like the mental part trumps it because it overrules the family and everything,” the source said.

Center for Estate Administration Reform founder Rick Black — CERA’s work on fraudulent guardianships resulted in criminal charges against at least 10 attorneys and inspired significant changes to Nevada law — said that mental health holds are a growing issue nationwide and are known by a variety of names: 5150 in California, Legal2000 in Nevada, Baker Act in Florida, and others.

“Holds are easily obtained by motivating a medical professional or law enforcement officer to take the vulnerable adult to a hospital,” Black said in an email. “Once admitted, qualified doctors have every ability, with good intentions or not, to draft paperwork that easily justifies a guardianship, whether one is needed or not.”

He Had a Stroke

Donna Donley protested the mental health petition filed by St. Francis for her father, Ken Donley.

She rushed to the hospital with evidence of her durable power of attorney; after she presented it, the mental health petition seemed to evaporate. Over the phone, the Tulsa County court clerk said it had been either dismissed or withdrawn, Donna Donley said.

It appeared that the effort to seize Ken Donley had been aborted.

He was promptly kicked back from Laureate to St. Francis; no one told his daughter, and for more than a day she didn’t know where her father was.

Donna Donley recalled a panicked phone call with someone at St. Francis, a good soul who was as distressed as Donna was at not being able to locate her father.

Hospital documents show that Ken Donley was returned to the St. Francis ER, and was then checked into a hospital room.

There, he had a stroke.

Ken Donley’s new nurses knew almost nothing about him — they hadn’t even been told he had family members who cared for him, Donna Donley said.

When she finally saw her father, Donna found scabs and abrasions on his wrists and ankles, with clear patterns of some kind of coarse strap having been used to restrain him.

The remainder of Ken Donley’s life played out sadly: he was sent to Rolling Hills Care Center in Catoosa, which was suggested by St. Francis, Donna Donley said, even though St. Francis boasts of being a world-class stroke recovery center.

In the weeks to come, as a result of an Oklahoma State Department of Health investigation initiated by Donna Donley, allegations of deficient practice for failing to provide adequate care to dependent residents at Rolling Hills were substantiated.

Ken Donley came home and died a short time later.

A Journey Into the Absurd

Although Donna Donley appears to have saved her father from a long stay at Laureate, she said she was left feeling that St. Francis had killed her father.

For the five days Ken Donley was held in Laureate, the psychiatric hospital charged $12,198, of which $10,714 was paid for by Medicare — that is, taxpayers.

After reading Leroy Theodore’s story, Donna Donley was inspired to find out more about what happened to her father, but her efforts to examine documents related to Laureate’s aborted medical health petition were stymied.

Tulsa records clerks permitted Donna to submit a request for documentation from Tulsa Judge Wilma Palmer, who presides over the mental health docket, adding the caveat that provisions of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 — known as HIPAA — might prevent access to documents even though Donna was an adult child invested with durable power of attorney over her father’s estate.

On July 18, the clerks indicated that Judge Palmer would see the request within a day; to date, no ruling or order on Donna’s request has been forthcoming.

Equally frustrating, the clerks could not cite the specific portion of HIPAA that would deny document access to a legal representative.

Efforts to pinpoint the relevant portion of HIPAA proved to be a futile journey into the absurd; neither the records clerks, nor Judge Palmer’s clerks, nor the communications director of the Tulsa County District Attorney’s office were able to reference the relevant portion of HIPAA.

CERA’s Rick Black was not surprised that the law was invoked by those who could not cite it.

“HIPAA is routinely violated in these proceedings as the evidence of a ‘claimed’ mental health concern is given to third parties who have no legitimate right to be provided these patients’ health records,” Black said. “The problem is that the system is managed within the civil court system. These courts can easily be perverted by the attorneys and professionals working there for self-serving reasons versus being in the best interest of the client.”

An exasperated Donna Donley, still grieving her father, expressed a similar sentiment more simply.

“It chaps my hide — DOGE can use Medicare and Medicaid information to deport people, but I can’t even get forms about my father,” Donna Donley said.

This article first appeared on Oklahoma Watch and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

The post Failed Seizure of a Vulnerable Vet at Oklahoma’s Largest Hospital Hints at Crisis to Come for Aging Population appeared first on oklahomawatch.org

Oklahoma Watch, at oklahomawatch.org, is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that covers public-policy issues facing the state.

Note: The following A.I. based commentary is not part of the original article, reproduced above, but is offered in the hopes that it will promote greater media literacy and critical thinking, by making any potential bias more visible to the reader –Staff Editor.

Political Bias Rating: Center-Left

This article focuses on systemic issues in eldercare and guardianship abuses, highlighting failures in healthcare and legal protections for vulnerable adults. The tone is critical of institutional practices, emphasizing the human and familial impact of bureaucratic and medical mismanagement. It leans toward advocating for accountability and reform, which aligns more with center-left concerns about social justice and protections for marginalized groups. However, the piece largely reports specific incidents and expert opinions without partisan language or ideological framing, maintaining a factual and empathetic approach rather than overt political advocacy.

SUMMARY: Landowners William and Lane Garrett in Logan County face repeated environmental damage after Phillips 66 contractors spilled hydraulic fluid on their property in March while building a pipeline. Recently, the same site was struck again, this time hitting an old, abandoned natural gas line owned by Energy Transfer, causing crude oil to flood their field near the Cimarron River. Phillips 66 confirmed the leak of one to two barrels of oil and says cleanup and remediation are underway, though the Garretts dispute the company’s claims of communication and safety assurances. Energy Transfer has not responded to inquiries. The Garretts remain frustrated by the repeated contamination and lack of accountability.

Logan County landowners say crews working on a new pipeline have once again contaminated their property—this time with crude oil—just months after crews spilled hydraulic fluid in the exact same spot.

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Source

by Keaton Ross, Oklahoma Watch
July 25, 2025

Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond has appointed the assistant executive coordinator of the District Attorneys Council as a special prosecutor in the Richard Glossip case, raising eyebrows among attorneys and prompting scrutiny from supporters of the former death row prisoner. 

Ryan Stephenson, a former Oklahoma County prosecutor who now serves as a legislative liaison and organizes training events for the DA Council, made an initial appearance on behalf of the state in the Glossip case on April 24. He received official notice of his appointment as a special assistant attorney general on June 4, nearly six weeks later. 

Stephenson, who earned $12,333 from the DA Council in May, has not received supplemental payments from the attorney general’s office, according to a records request fulfilled on July 18. 

The appointment comes two years after several district attorneys sparred with Drummond over his efforts to overturn Glossip’s death sentence over prosecutorial misconduct. In a group text thread, a few district attorneys suggested wielding their collective power to get Drummond to recuse and choose one of them to represent the state in the matter. 

“The AG [Drummond] has a conflict of interest because he has taken a position against the victim and so he should appoint one of us,” District 8 District Attorney Brian Hermanson wrote on May 9, 2023. “Then we can do it on the AG’s nickel.” 

Drummond ultimately prevailed when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Glossip’s death sentence on Feb. 25 because the prosecution knowingly withheld evidence. But his office is now seeking to convict Glossip of non-capital first-degree murder in Oklahoma County District Court, a reversal from 2023, when he agreed over email to accept a time-served plea deal on an accessory to murder charge. In a July 16 court filing, the Attorney General’s office stated the deal was still being negotiated and was anticipatory at best. 

Multiple attorneys, who requested anonymity because they are working on pending cases involving the attorney general’s office, said Stephenson’s appointment to the case is unusual and not clearly outlined in statute. 

Section 215.28 of Title 19 of the Oklahoma Statutes states that the assistant executive coordinator shall devote full time to their duties and not engage in the private practice of law. Working on behalf of the state is generally considered public practice, but long hours could interfere with his full-time employment. 

The statute Drummond cited when appointing Stephenson does not explicitly authorize a special assistant attorney general, though it grants the attorney general the broad authority to appoint employees deemed necessary for the “proper performance of his or her duties.” 

Brook Arbeitman, a spokesperson for Oklahoma County District Attorney Vicki Behenna, said Behenna had no involvement in the appointment. Through District Attorney’s Council spokesperson Damon Gardenhire, Stephenson declined comment and referred questions to the attorney general’s office.

Leslie Berger, a spokeswoman for Drummond, acknowledged an inquiry from Oklahoma Watch on July 14 but said a person with knowledge of the situation was unavailable. Several follow-up requests for comment were unsuccessful. 

Three of Glossip’s most vocal supporters, including a current and one former state lawmaker, said Stephenson’s appointment appears to be a political maneuver to win back support from Oklahoma’s district attorneys. Drummond, a Republican, launched his gubernatorial campaign in January and will face a crowded primary field in 2026. 

“He’s just giving them [DA’s Council] a shot at him regardless of what’s right and what’s wrong,” said Rep. Justin Humphrey, a Republican from Lane who has said he believes Glossip is innocent. 

Justin Jackson, a former state Senate candidate from Tuskahoma and personal friend of Glossip, said he approached Drummond at a fundraising event in Stephens County to talk about the case. He said Drummond responded that the state had an obligation to follow the process.

“He has scars,” Jackson said. “But my response to him was an endorsement from the DAs means nothing to the populace of Oklahoma. It’s more important that he stood up for what was right, and I’m grateful he did at the time that he did.” 

Kevin McDugle, a former state representative who tried to pause the death penalty because he believes Glossip is innocent, said he had several productive meetings with Drummond in 2023 to discuss the case. 

“It’s 1,000% political,” McDugle said. “The DAC were aggravated at him and he needs their support for governor. Now he’s trying to play both sides, and that aggravates me.”

The District Attorneys Council, a state agency tasked with providing administrative support and training to Oklahoma’s 27 independently elected district attorneys, isn’t allowed to endorse candidates. But a closely related group with nearly identical leadership, the Oklahoma District Attorney’s Association, is politically active. The DA Association, which isn’t subject to Oklahoma’s open meetings law, usually meets five minutes after the conclusion of the DA Council meeting. 

The DA Association lobbied against three criminal justice reform ballot initiatives that appeared on the ballot since 2016: State Question 780, State Question 805 and State Question 820. The organization also joined an amicus brief asking the U.S. Supreme Court to uphold Glossip’s death sentence. 

With a potential trial date likely several months or years in the future, the most recent discussion has centered on whether Glossip should be allowed to bond out of the Oklahoma County Detention Center. Oklahoma County District Judge Heather Coyle issued a ruling late Wednesday afternoon denying the defense’s motion to set bond, writing that the state has shown clear and convincing evidence of Glossip’s guilt. 

During a July 21 status conference, Glossip’s attorneys argued he should be granted release on his own recognizance because Drummond preliminarily agreed to release him on time served in 2023. 

“There can be no better statement that the state of Oklahoma does not believe that Mr. Glossip is a danger to anyone in any way,” attorney Don Knight wrote in a July 16 filing. 

In response, Senior Assistant Attorney General Jennifer Hinsperger said the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling does not discredit other evidence tying Glossip to Barry Van Treese’s murder. 

“The State maintains that the evidence against Mr. Glossip remains as strong today as it did at the time of the prior juries’ verdicts of guilt,” she wrote. 

Hinsperger and Jimmy Harmon, the chief of the attorney general’s criminal division, are prosecuting the Glossip case alongside Stephenson. Both previously worked as assistant district attorneys for the Oklahoma County DA’s office.  

The next hearing, where the two sides could decide when to consider the defense’s motion to honor the 2023 plea agreement, is set for Aug. 14 at 1 p.m. 

In a June 9 written statement, Drummond vowed that his office would re-prosecute Glossip solely on hard facts, solid evidence and truthful testimony. He said he decided not to seek the death penalty because Justin Sneed, Glossip’s co-conspirator, who admitted to beating Van Treese to death with a baseball bat in an Oklahoma City motel room in 1997, received life without the possibility of parole. Glossip has maintained that Sneed implicated him as plotting the murder to avoid getting the death penalty. 

“The Van Treese family has endured grief, pain and frustration since the murder of their loved one, and my heart goes out to them,” Drummond said. “The poor judgment and previous misconduct of past prosecutors have only compounded that pain and frustration. While I cannot go back 25 years and handle the case in the proper way that would have ensured true justice, I still have a duty to seek the justice that is available today.”

This article first appeared on Oklahoma Watch and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

The post Oklahoma District Attorneys Gain Ally in Glossip Case appeared first on oklahomawatch.org

Oklahoma Watch, at oklahomawatch.org, is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that covers public-policy issues facing the state.

Note: The following A.I. based commentary is not part of the original article, reproduced above, but is offered in the hopes that it will promote greater media literacy and critical thinking, by making any potential bias more visible to the reader –Staff Editor.

Political Bias Rating: Center-Right

This article presents a detailed account of the Richard Glossip case with a focus on legal and political maneuvering involving Oklahoma’s Attorney General Gentner Drummond, a Republican preparing for a gubernatorial run. The coverage highlights tension between the AG and local district attorneys, emphasizing political strategy behind appointments and prosecutorial decisions. The language remains largely factual and neutral, but the framing around Drummond’s political calculations and criticism from Republican supporters suggests a mild center-right perspective, reflecting mainstream conservative legal and political concerns without overt editorializing or partisan rhetoric.