On a chilly night in April 2023, Charlotte Walker got a text message. Her sister, 68-year-old Barbara Walker, was in jail and facing a felony.
Barbara’s crime: starting a fire to keep warm.
Charlotte was infuriated. Her sister, who has schizophrenia, should not have been living on the street at all.
Under an arrangement with the Social Security Administration known as the representative payee program, a staff member at the local nonprofit Outreach Community Health Centers was supposed to be assisting Barbara with housing.
That employee, Elizabeth Gabriel, was responsible for receiving Barbara’s monthly disability benefit checks and using the money to help her secure food, medicine and housing. Since 2017, Gabriel had collected over $80,000 on Barbara’s behalf, approximately $900 per month.
But over the past three years, Barbara’s siblings say their sister has consistently lived on and off the street while Gabriel has repeatedly failed to return phone calls, text messages and letters about their sister’s care. They say neither she nor Outreach has provided insight into why Barbara was unhoused or how the funds were used.
Three disability and elder care advocates who reviewed Barbara’s case agreed that aspects of Gabriel’s conduct were unusual and seemingly in violation of standard rules for payeeships.
The program, which is overseen by the Social Security Administration, has notable problems. A 2023 audit found that the administration repeatedly failed to investigate accusations of misuse of funds in a timely manner.
Outreach declined to comment on the Walker family’s complaints, citing federal privacy laws. Gabriel did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Charlotte is concerned her sister is not the only person with this experience.
“Where there is one person being impacted, it’s not just one, it’s multiple,” she said.
Lack of communication leaves family confused and worried
Throughout 2020 and 2021, Charlotte believed that her sister was living comfortably in an all-women’s group home off of East Garfield Avenue.
But in 2022, members of their extended family said they started finding Barbara sleeping on the streets. They reported numerous failed attempts to reach Gabriel and share their concerns.
Charlotte, who lives in Texas, made a visit to Milwaukee that year. After several ignored calls to Gabriel, Charlotte said she resorted to driving around the streets for hours to locate her sister.
Eventually, she found Barbara perched on the curb of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Drive with a blanket draped over her lap and a headwrap covering her ears.
“(Barbara) told me ‘My worker keeps placing me in group homes with men and women. I told her I didn’t feel safe there, so I left in the middle of the night,'” Charlotte recalled.
Family members of Barbara Walker are concerned that she does not have stable housing in Milwaukee despite having a representative payee who is supposed to help her use her disability benefits for housing.
Barbara ventured back out onto the street in 2023, spending much of the year living in and out of shelters and at a CITGO gas station. The owners allowed her to sleep in a corner of the building because of the extreme cold weather, Charlotte said.
Barbara began searching for alternative ways to stay warm. At one point, Charlotte said Barbara told her that Street Angels, a Milwaukee nonprofit serving homeless residents, gave her blankets and socks to wear.
Then, Barbara lit the fire that landed her in jail.
Charlotte said Gabriel made little effort to respond to the family’s pleas to help their sister find stable housing.
Public Investigator reviewed dozens of text messages Gabriel exchanged with Charlotte between May 2023 and August 2024.
On several occasions, Gabriel told Charlotte that her sister did not want the family to purchase a phone for her or want to speak with family members at all. Gabriel said Barbara only felt comfortable texting from Gabriel’s cell phone.
In other updates, Gabriel told Charlotte she had given Barbara $10 to $20 per week to pay for her food and cigarettes, ignoring Charlotte’s questions about how the remaining funds were used each month.
In one instance, Charlotte told Gabriel she wanted to send money to help Barbara get food and a hotel. Gabriel replied that the only way the family could do so was through a money order in Gabriel’s name.
A text conversation between Charlotte Walker and Elizabeth Gabriel in spring 2024.
Later, in May 2024, Gabriel texted that she wanted to send the family some of Barbara’s Social Security money because she “had a lot.” Charlotte denied the offer and asked Gabriel why the money was not put toward her sister’s living expenses.
Neither Charlotte or her relatives ever received the money or figured out how much Gabriel had accumulated.
In February 2025, Barbara was hospitalized with third-degree frostbite at Aurora Sinai Medical Center. Charlotte said doctors considered amputating several of her toes due to severe nerve damage.
Over the past three years, Charlotte said she has received no response from Outreach Community Health Centers despite making dozens of attempts to contact president Julia Harris-Robinson.
The longstanding nonprofit provides primary medical care, dental treatment and behavioral health care to uninsured, publicly insured or low-income individuals primarily on Milwaukee’s northwest side, specializing in helping those who are homeless.
Outreach refused requests from Public Investigator to answer general questions about its operations or its protective payee program, including its process for flagging and investigating complaints of abuse.
The Wisconsin Department of Health Services has recorded one complaint made against Outreach Community Health Center since 2023. That complaint, according to spokesperson Jennifer Miller, was unsubstantiated.
Experts note red flags, vulnerabilities in payee system
Attorneys who work with people with disabilities told Public Investigator that many payees follow the rules, but a lack of accountability for tracking spending does allow for some cases of misuse to go unaddressed.
Sonia Komisar, a victim service attorney for the Coalition of Wisconsin Aging & Health Groups, said Gabriel’s accumulation of Social Security funds and acceptance of additional money from Walker’s family were “red flags.”
Gabriel’s offer to give Barbara’s leftover funds to the family was also troubling, she said.
“The representative payees are supposed to be spending the money to prevent them from becoming homeless,” she said. “Giving away her money while she’s homeless is not in her best interest.”
Nadya Rosen, the director of legal and advocacy services for Disability Rights Wisconsin, said most representative payees’ sole responsibility is to pay their clients’ bills.
However, payees who are working for nonprofits and operating in a case manager capacity, as Gabriel likely was, also have an obligation to work in the best interest of their clients, including a responsibility to ensure they are housed, Rosen said.
Rosen added that under no circumstance should payees or case managers block communication with family members, as Barbara’s family suspects.
“Isolating people who are already isolated a lot of ways, it just leads to more opportunity for abuse and abusive conduct,” Rosen said.
Outreach Community Health Centers at 220 West Capitol Dr. in Milwaukee.
Charlotte raised her suspicions about the potential misuse of her sister’s disability funds with the Social Security Administration in April. She did not receive a response from the agency until Public Investigator followed up on her behalf in May.
Elida Elizondo, a spokesperson for the Social Security Administration, told Public Investigator that privacy laws prevent her from discussing Barbara’s case.
However, she said the agency thoroughly vets people who apply to be representative payees. According to Elizondo, the agency first searches for family members or friends to serve as payees. If they are unable to do so, the agency then searches for qualified organizations.
Since Barbara’s siblings live out of state, they said they believed the payee program would be the best way to take care of Barbara’s basic needs. But the experience has brought nothing but frustration and distress, Charlotte said.
In 2023, an audit of the Social Security Administration estimated that in 81% of cases, the agency did not take timely action in response to allegations of payees misusing benefits.
As a result, the agency continued paying approximately $186 million to payees who may not have been using the funds for beneficiaries’ needs, the report found.
Additionally, the audit found the agency failed to recover nearly $120,000 in funds from 19 payees out of a sample of 50 payees determined to have misused benefits.
Rosen and Komisar said payees are required to keep records of how the funds are spent and provide documentation if requested for an audit, but that is rare.
“You’re holding them in anticipation of having to prove it, but you don’t actually have to prove constantly what you spent the money on,” Rosen said.
Social Security Administration now investigating family’s allegations
Barbara is being held at the Mendota Mental Health Institute, a psychiatric hospital in Madison, while awaiting her September court hearing for the arson charges. There, Barbara has regular access to a phone and has already made several calls to her sister, Charlotte said.
Barbara Walker
Because Barbara is incarcerated, her Social Security disability benefits have been suspended.
In June, after Public Investigator asked the Social Security Administration for an update, Elizondo contacted Charlotte the next day to say the agency was initiating a review of the family’s allegations.
Jill Lintonen, a spokesperson for Milwaukee County’s Department of Behavioral Health Services, said the county would cooperate with the investigation. The county conducts regular audits and background checks to ensure clients in payeeships are protected, according to Lintonen.
“We strongly believe that perpetrators of such crimes should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, and be banned from providing services to vulnerable people for life,” Lintonen said in a statement.
Though Charlotte is unsure if the Social Security Administration’s investigation will make a difference in stopping her sister’s current cycle of court cases and institutionalization, she said she is grateful for Public Investigator’s help.
“Barbara happens to have a sister that’s retired and refused to let this happen to her,” Charlotte said. “For all those people who have no voice, except the ones that are inside their head, who are being taken advantage of, I’m grateful that we can have someone like you reach out and get answers.”
The last time that Charlotte spoke to Gabriel, she said Gabriel accused her of “harassing her” about Barbara. Charlotte has not attempted to reach out since.
When Public Investigator called Outreach on June 25 to confirm if Gabriel was still employed, a receptionist transferred the call to Gabriel’s phone extension.
The mailbox was full.
Tamia Fowlkes is a Public Investigator reporter for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. She can be reached at tfowlkes@gannett.com.
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This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Family fears Milwaukee woman’s payee misused her Social Security funds