The Porch

LA GRANDE, Ore. — Patty Bingaman came to the door of Nadine's Nest on the evening of July 30 with a single sheet of paper: the Letters Testamentary a Union County judge signed making her the legal voice of her late husband's estate. She asked the caregiver who answered whether she could see her husband's care records. This reporter accompanied her.

It was the first time she had stood at that door since her husband left the house nearly two years earlier, and she had reason to expect it would not open. Oregon's Department of Human Services had already substantiated a finding of abuse against the woman who runs the home for locking Patty out of it. Police had once been called to escort her off the property. And for six months of 2024, the home billed his account $1,000 a month in charges it labeled "visitation restriction non-compliance" — charges that began months before any court restricted her visits at all.

The caregiver was alone in the house that evening. She said the records were there. She also said she could not view them without the operator, Tempie Bartell, who was not answering her phone. She reached Tempie Bartell's husband, who said he was on his way. Nobody could say when he would arrive. Oregon's rule does not ask a widow to stand on a porch for however long that takes. It says readily available, and that evening the records were not. Patty, 78, thanked the woman and walked back to the car without having seen a page.

Sixteen days earlier, the state had inspected Nadine's Nest — in response to Patty's complaint about those very records — and certified the home in compliance.

Russell Bingaman lived at Nadine's Nest until October 2024. He died the following January, on the 29th. He and Patty were married 58 years. In March 2025, the Union County Circuit Court appointed her personal representative of his estate.

The rule she came to invoke is one sentence long. Oregon requires an adult foster home to keep each resident's records "readily available" at the home for residents' representatives and other legally authorized persons. Patty is that person, and a resident record is the fullest account that exists of a life in licensed care: the doctor's orders, the medication logs, the care plan, the incident reports, the daily notes on how a man is eating, sleeping, moving, failing. Whatever happened to Russell in his last year in that house is written there, or is supposed to be.

She first asked for it in April 2025. She has now been asking for 474 days.

To understand what it took for a 78-year-old woman to drive herself to that door alone, it helps to know what the previous three years had taught her to expect.

In February 2023, with the state's licensor copied on the email, Bartell acknowledged in writing what the law required of her: "It was brought to my attention that I can not restrict visitors."

That August she turned to a state form to do it anyway. On an Oregon DHS limitation form dated Aug. 14, 2023, Bartell wrote: "I, Tempie Bartell, Licensee for Nadine's Nest Adult Foster Home request that Patty Bingaman, resident's wife, be restricted to twice weekly visits… Each visit to last no longer than 30 minutes total." The justification said Russell was disturbed every time she came. Then it went further, calling Patty a "health and safety risk to other residents in the home," claiming she "has tried to change clothing of other residents," kissed them on the cheek, and "refuses to stop this behavior."

Elisha Callahand, a caregiver who worked at Nadine's Nest during that period, was asked in a recorded 2025 interview whether any resident had ever been put off by Patty, or felt touched inappropriately.

"The other residents, yeah, no," she said. Told the form claimed Patty touched residents in inappropriate ways and made them uncomfortable, she answered: "That was never — none of them ever told me that." The residents, she said, "did love Patty."

The form carried its own answer. Its decision page says the resident is the one whose consent governs: "If the individual does not agree or consent to a limitation, it will not be put in place."

Nobody at the home or the agency asked Russell. What happened instead is that the push to restrict his wife picked up a partner inside the state. At 4:10 on the afternoon of Aug. 17, 2023 — three days after the date on the form — ODHS licensor Erin Smith emailed the deputy long-term care ombudsman, Kat Thomas, whose office exists to advocate for residents of long-term care homes. Bartell was copied. "I am reaching out because I have an AFH that I believe could benefit from your additional support," Smith wrote. Bartell, she explained, was interested in putting a limitation "in place for a private pay resident to restrict a specific visitor." Twenty-three minutes later, Thomas wrote back offering a phone consult at 9 the next morning.

Thomas went and asked Russell — the only official in the chain who did. "I confirmed he did want to visit with his wife," she wrote afterward. She was "unable to determine if the spouse visitations were overwhelming Mr. Bingaman as the adult foster home provider had shared." What made him anxious, she wrote, was being asked questions about his wife's visits.

The form went forward anyway. On Sept. 14, Bartell emailed Thomas that the paperwork was ready: "I have the form done” The email recorded where the procedural advice was coming from: "Erin Smith said that there needs to be a witness to that signature and suggested that I ask if you can sign as a witness?"

The resident's advocate, asked to witness the paper restricting the resident's wife, declined within the hour: "As a resident advocate I'm not allowed to perform those duties." Bartell pressed twice more that afternoon. "How does licensing get the information that you agreed with the proposed limitation on Patty's visit?" she wrote. Then: "Can you help me understand why you can't witness as when we had our meeting you agreed that these limitations would benefit Russell. We came to you to help represent Russell in this issue?"

Thomas's answer went out at 3:48 p.m. "I was representing Russell and he had shared with me he wanted to visit his wife," she wrote. "I represent the resident...always."

The form was signed twelve days later, on Sept. 26 — and its own pages preserve what the deputy had told the family.  "Deputy Thomas shared that the resident did communicate he would like to visit with his wife, but was upset by current problems," the form reads. It records her warning as well: Thomas "shared that the resident was the individual to agree with this arrangement."

On Oct. 27, Thomas sent her account of the episode to three ODHS officials, Smith among them. The day before, in a phone interview with the state's abuse investigators — memorialized in an investigation file that identifies her only as a witness — she had described what the two months amounted to: "My position is being used in a way that it was not intended. I did not agree to any document." She had asked her supervisor to take her off the matter. "This has been one of the worst experiences I have had in this position," she told them, "and it's a real mess."

Smith is the same licensor who, three years later, would inspect the home and certify it in compliance.

By then Patty had been barred from the ordinary acts of a wife. Written house rules told her staff alone would handle Russell's feeding, bathing, shaving, briefs and clothes: "Due to the lack of liability insurance to cover family members or visitors providing personal care, only staff may provide personal care for Russell and the other residents." After 58 years, she could not change her husband's soiled clothes or help him into a shower without a staff member being summoned.

The state investigated the lockouts and substantiated a count of involuntary seclusion against Bartell — abuse, under Oregon's rules protecting vulnerable adults — after Patty was shut out of the home in August 2023.

On Oct. 31, 2023, at 11:36 in the morning, the home, at Bartells directoin,  called the police on Pattyr. The complaint was trespass. The responding account records that Patty was inside, that she left when the officers came, that she was courteous, and that what she wanted was help from adult protective services.

That police call is what finally ended the limitation — not because anyone acted on Patty's complaints, but because the removal triggered a state investigation. Its disposition, on the findings page: "The IBL will be removed and no restrictions on visitation will be initiated." The operator told investigators she had tried to follow the limitation's rules and was "not aware the IBL was in violation of the Individual Based Limitations rules."

The restricting still did not stop. On July 12, 2024, Patty drove to the home to visit her husband and found the door locked. A co-guardian's journal entry two days earlier recorded where the permission had come from: "NN can lock door to keep Patty out Erin Smith (APD) talked w/ Aaron Lenox + Tempie Bartell."

Smith and Lenox are the two ODHS employees Patty would name in the complaint that produced the compliance certificate.

Then they started charging her for it. Through April 2024, the invoices for Russell's care ran $6,000 a month. In May they jumped to $7,000, and the new line read: "visitation restriction non-compliance and additional staffing required $1000." It appears on every invoice from May through October — $6,000 in surcharges, billed to a dying man's account, because his wife kept coming to see him.

No court had restricted Patty's visits when those charges started. The co-guardians' attorney did not file the motion to limit her association with her husband until June 25. Judge Wes Williams did not sign the order until Sept. 16, five months into the billing. It gave her one visit a week, thirty minutes long, on a day of her choosing, plus a single two-hour anniversary visit.

She kept to it. No court or agency has ever found that she violated the order.

The account Bartell gave that day did not go unchallenged. On Feb. 24, 2025, this reporter — acting as an interested party in the guardianship, not as a journalist — sent a certified packet titled "Evidence of False Testimony" to the three lawyers in the case: Patty's own attorney, the co-guardians' attorney, and Emily Cooper, the lawyer appointed to represent Russell. It set the testimony against the records. Bartell had told the court Russell "gained a little bit of weight" and was "much improved." The packet documented 160 pounds on June 25, 2024, and 132 pounds that August — a 28-pound loss in 43 days. It also analyzed every visit Patty made in the four months before the first restriction: 36 visits, more than 94 percent logged without incident.

By this summer, Patty had spent 15 months asking for Russell's record through every channel that existed — the operator, lawyers, the state's complaint system — and had been told, most recently by ODHS program manager Lynette Ross, that no rule obliged Bartell to mail, fax or email anything. The operator's only duty was to keep the record available at the home, for the representative to inspect.

So on day 471, Patty drove to the house.

"What else was I supposed to do?" she said afterward.

The trip cost more than it showed. "The drive there was hard, but as soon as I started speaking I became calm," she said, adding that the caregiver...  "was very nice."

The state has done this job before, at this same home, under this same rule.

In January 2024, the representative of another deceased resident asked Nadine's Nest for that resident's records and did not receive them. That representative did not wait 15 months. On March 12, 2024, ODHS cited the home: "Deceased resident's representative requested access to the resident records in January 2024," the citation reads. "As of March 12 authorized representative had not received records." The state ordered it corrected within eight days. Bartell's signed plan of correction says she collected the authorization the next afternoon and turned over "a copy of all the records." The correction took one day.

The agency was not being generous. Between 2018 and 2024 it substantiated nine violations at Nadine's Nest and fined Bartell five times, $1,300 in all, including for failing to have a qualified caregiver present. In late 2023 it placed a formal condition on her license for "failed to assure resident rights."

Patty's request has produced no citation. What it produced, on July 14, was a one-page Statement of Compliance.

That certificate answered a complaint Patty filed in June with the ODHS Governor's Advocacy Office, the agency's own ombuds unit. Her complaint alleged her requests had been ignored because of her age, and asked the agency to open a formal investigation into why two of its own employees — Smith and Lenox — had received the enforcement demands and taken no action. The inspection that answered it was conducted and signed by Smith. What the state offered as proof came on July 21, when Ross answered Patty with two photographs. They were pictures of a printout of an email — Bartell writing to Patty's then-attorney on May 22, 2025: "Here is everything from the Nadine's Nest chart that I have of the items you requested." The same photographed page showed what became of that email. The address was misspelled, and the mail system bounced it back to Bartell's own inbox the same morning. It never reached anyone. Bartell kept the printout in her records anyway, Ross wrote, "to show the date she sent the records to the lawyer." Patty asked for the email itself. "I don't have the email otherwise I would just be able to forward it," Ross answered on July 27. "That is why I shared the print." The page the state offered to show the records had been sent also showed they had never arrived.

The office closed the complaint on July 27. Patty objected in writing the same day. On July 29, complaint coordinator Jason Wenig wrote that Bartell had transmitted electronic files to the local ODHS office on July 28. The office could not open them. He acknowledged Patty's objection to Smith inspecting a complaint that had named Smith, and added a promise: "I will continue to monitor this process until the records have been successfully provided."

On the discrimination claim, the office's own rulebook is specific. The rule requires an investigation, an interview with the complainant, and a written Letter of Determination within 60 days. The office accepted Patty's age complaint as timely under it. No one has interviewed her. No determination has issued.

The rule's text covers discrimination "on the basis of disability." Age appears nowhere in it — though ODHS client brochures, including one published in April 2024, promise the agency does not discriminate by age and route age complaints to this same office. The appeal body the rule offers, a Civil Rights Review Board, is defined as "a panel of Department employees appointed by the Director." No roster, meeting record or decision of that board could be located in the agency's published reports, in state archives or in court records. In 2024, of 1,503 concern entries the office coded across every ODHS program, five involved discrimination.

The office's own numbers show it slipping. In early 2023, about one case in six took longer than 60 days to close. By early 2025 it was more than one in three, with the caseload up by nearly half.

The state is not the only closed door.

On April 3, Valor Investigates, which publishes this story, mailed two letters about Russell's records. One went to Emily Cooper, the Disability Rights Oregon attorney who represented Russell as the protected person in the guardianship case — the lawyer whose job was his interests. It came back marked unable to forward.

The other went to a clinic address Oregon business filings list for Bartell. The Postal Service left notices on May 9 and May 14. Nobody claimed it. That envelope came back stamped in block capitals: RETURN TO SENDER. UNCLAIMED. UNABLE TO FORWARD.

At 8:08 the morning after the porch, Patty emailed Wenig, asking the office to reopen her complaint, interview her, and either enforce the records rule at Nadine's Nest or say in writing who could.

About three and a half hours later, Bartell texted her.

"I will get you the print out of the notes on Monday. You can pick them up at the DHS office after 2 pm. I am out of town until then. Do not go to Nadine's Nest again as you were harassing my staff."

The harassment consisted of a 78-year-old widow presenting a court document, asking once, waiting while a caregiver made phone calls, and leaving.

It was not the first time asserting a right had produced an accusation against her. When she kept visiting in 2023, the home's paperwork called her a health and safety risk to other residents. When she kept visiting in 2024, her husband's account was billed $1,000 a month for non-compliance with a restriction no court had yet imposed. Now, asking to inspect the record the state says must be available to her, she was harassing the staff.

At 2:06 that afternoon, Ross emailed Patty. "If I had the records, I would have provided them to you already," she wrote. "At this time, neither I nor the local office have the documents in our possession. ... ODHS is not the custodian of these records, and we do not hold them." Bartell was out of state, she noted, and the licensor was "working with her remotely to obtain the records." Then: "I agree that the delay has gone on too long. We have made it clear to Tempie that she must provide the records to you."

By Friday evening the paper trail contradicted itself day by day. On July 14 the state certified the records present at the home. On July 21 its proof that they had ever been sent was a photographed printout of an email that had bounced. On July 29 it said Bartell had sent them to its local office. On July 31 it said it held no documents at all. And the operator — never cited across Patty's 15 months of asking — was directing the widow to collect a printout at the state's own office, the office the state says is not the custodian of anything.

Patty answered Ross that afternoon. "I cannot access the records at Nadine's Nest and making a lawful request was 'harassment,'" she wrote. "I will wait until Monday. I do hope that 'notes' are what Tempie calls MARs, narratives, and everything else I am entitled to as Russell's Personal Representative."

Under Oregon's retention rule, Russell's record must be preserved until roughly October 2027, three years after he left the home.

On Monday, after 2 p.m., Patty has been told, a printout of "the notes" will be waiting at a state office — handed across a government counter, from an operator who says she may not return to the house where the rule says the record lives.

Asked why she keeps going,  "So that others won't have to go through the same thing," she said.

Monday will be day 475.