She laments wanting to tell the story at all. She loves both her daughters, but is, Kris Worthy says, at the end of her rope.
Her oldest daughter is 21 and has long suffered from problems, she said. In recent years, they were compounded by her use of alcohol. Two years ago, fed up with the family telling her to get help and put her life together, the daughter fled to California to live with an aunt.
And then, October arrived. And with it more trouble.
In ordinary times, Kris Worthy might have just paid up and made her eldest’s sin right.
But these are not ordinary times. Several months back, she was laid off from her job, and now barely gets by working as a temp at an insurance agency.
So all she can do, she says, is console her youngest daughter, Maddi, 19, share her anger and pray the hospital takes pity.
The oldest daughter had come back to Denver. And it wasn’t long before police caught up with her downtown. She was falling-down drunk.
She knew, she would later confess to her mother, that she could not tell officers her real name, not with old warrants still outstanding for her arrest in Denver.
So she said she had no identification as the officers summoned the wagon to haul her off to sober up at detox.
Well, what was her name? the officers asked.
“Maddi Robinson,” she told them, giving her sister’s age and her address.
What actually happened that night Kris Worthy knows only from the bills that began arriving for Maddi at her Aurora home.
All told, the woman’s drunken spree left her sister owing more than $4,000.
Her first stop was at the Denver Cares detox center. The next bill shows an ambulance was called, which transported her to Denver Health Medical Center “in restraints.”
“It was only after (she) was gone and we started getting all these bills that we began to put it together,” Kris Worthy said.
For the past several weeks, she and Maddi have gone to the detox center, the ambulance operator and Denver Health trying to explain what happened.
No one, she said, has been sympathetic.
Dee Martinez, a Denver Health spokeswoman, said she was aware of the case of the two sisters, but could not comment because it is being investigated as possible fraud.
Maddi, who works a $10-an- hour-job at a collection agency, is frightened over what failing to pay the bills will do to her fledgling credit history.
A few weeks ago, she filled out a police complaint against her sister.
The woman has had an alcohol problem for three years, Kris Worthy said.
“And though I still love her, it is not right was she has done to Maddi.”
She wonders how such a thing could happen.
“They didn’t in all of it bother to take a photograph, even a thumbprint,” she said.
She finally reached her eldest daughter the other day in California. Maddi refused to speak with her sister.
“I’ll just tell them it was me,” the eldest daughter told her mother.
Immediately Kris Worthy again felt sorrow for both of her daughters, one who still doesn’t understand what she has done, and one who will not forgive.
Bill Johnson writes Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at 303-954-2763 or wjohnson@denverpost.com.
