NEED HELP WITH IDENTITY Angel Kandiess Lovell Mikkelsen, b Waco, TX 1963
From our local Albany, Oregon paper.Any relatives out there who can help this lady with family information?Short information, she was born Dec. 5, 1963, Waco, TX.Raised by grandmother Della Lovell, who died about 12 years ago.Doesn't know her mother's name.Raised in Texas, Kansas.
http://www.democratherald.com/articles/2007/08/14/news/local/8aaa02_id.txthttp://www.democratherald.com/articles/2007/08/14/news/local/8aaa02_id.txt
By Jennifer Moody
Albany Democrat-Herald , Albany, Oregon
BROWNSVILLE — Kandiess Mikkelsen knows who she is. The problem is proving it to the federal government.
She has a driver’s license, a marriage certificate and an employment record from 1997. She also has a stack of medical records from the 2005 car wreck that stole most of her memories and nearly took her life.
What she doesn’t have is a birth certificate, or any information that might help her track it down.
Strike one.
Also, the Social Security number she’s been using since age 14 comes back registered to someone else.
Strike two.
For more than a year, Mikkelsen, 44, has been living on food stamps and the kindness of strangers. She has been trying to get disability benefits to have some form of income.
So far, however, she keeps striking out.
“I have no money, no income and no family,” said Mikkelsen, in a smoker’s alto that retains traces of her native Texan accent.
She turns in pop cans for change. Shelters have donated food for her four teacup Chihuahuas, which she calls her only real possessions.
Right now, she’s staying in a manufactured home in Brownsville belonging to an acquaintance, but that’s an arrangement soon to end.
“I worry every day about having nowhere to live,” she said.
The office of U.S. Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Springfield, is trying to help by suggesting documents to research to fix the Social Security problem.
The Albany branch of Senior and Disability Services is involved, too. Caseworker Lois Murphy gives Mikkelsen gas vouchers for doctor’s appointments and is trying to get help to track down identifying documents.
To date, however, nothing’s turned up.
School records? Purged in routine maintenance.
Medical records? The oldest one Mikkelsen has been able to find is a California dental bill from the late ’90s.
Passport? Military record? Adoption decree? Baptismal certificate?
No, no, no and no.
It’s not that Social Security doesn’t believe her, said representative Linda Costarella, who works in the Seattle regional office. It’s that new restrictions require applicants to show proof of both identity and U.S. citizenship.
The driver’s license and other paperwork Mikkelsen holds are a good start, she said. But more is needed to prove she’s been in this country — and been the same person — all along.
“The proof has to come from a couple of sources, and the older the better,” Costarella said.
The agency isn’t sure how Mikkelsen has been able to work, drive and receive food stamps, health benefits and unemployment during the past 30 years without a valid Social Security number.
At this point, Costarella said, the only thing she can say is no records trace back to Mikkelsen, only to a woman in Portland.
“Our goal now is to help (Mikkelsen) give us enough information that we can find her,” Costarella said.
Mikkelsen has plenty of company in the who-are-you department.
The Oregon Department of Human Services says 1,011 Oregonians, many of them children, were cut off from health services earlier this year because they could not prove citizenship. That requirement comes from a federal law affecting many Medicaid programs, including the Oregon Health Plan.
The law, part of the U.S. Deficit Reduction Act of 2005, was created to weed out people who soak up state medical benefits without being legal residents.
State officials, however, believe most of the people caught short of documents actually are citizens. Only three of the 1,011 people without paperwork were from Spanish-speaking households, for instance.
So far, losing health care is a fate Mikkelsen hasn’t suffered. She was on the Oregon Health Plan before her wreck, and Senior Services is holding her case open during the citizenship research.
But her situation illustrates what can happen when somebody doesn’t have a document most other Americans take for granted.
“Until we find the right documentation, Kandiess is our daily reminder that the rules can be cruel,” said Scott Bond, director of Senior and Disability Services.
Angel Kandiess Lovell was born in Waco, Texas, on Dec. 5, 1963. She was raised by her grandmother, Della Lovell, who died about 12 years ago. The Mikkelsen name came from her second husband, whom she met a decade ago in Oregon.
Mikkelsen said she never asked her mother’s name.
“I never questioned it, because I didn’t care,” she said. “I had a good childhood.”
She fell in love at age 14 and her grandmother agreed to let her get married. She received her Social Security number around that same time, although whether that was before, after or because of her marriage she’s no longer sure. Nor does she still have the card, but she has used the number since.
Mikkelsen’s husband was killed in a motorcycle accident three years later in California, while the two were visiting friends. She moved back home to Texas, to her grandmother.
The two moved a few times over the next decade or so; to Kansas, to various cities in Texas. Mikkelsen remembers managing apartment complexes in Texas during that time.Lived in Texas, Kansas with grandmother.Married at the age of 14.
When her grandmother died, Mikkelsen caught a bus to California, with a vague idea of seeing the ocean. She became an in-home caregiver there. A year later, she caught a ride north to Oregon and stopped in Brookings, where she filed for unemployment and met her second husband. They married in 1997.
They lived in Brownsville for a while, then Peoria. She’s fuzzy on the details.
“This is the thing that’s causing a lot of problems,” Mikkelsen said. “I don’t have a memory anymore.”
Mikkelsen lost her memories in a head-on wreck the morning of Aug. 26, 2005.
The impact killed the other driver. Mikkelsen went to Good Samaritan in Corvallis and then by helicopter to Legacy Emanuel Hospital in Portland.
Dr. Ameen Ramzy, Legacy trauma surgeon and the lead physician on Mikkelsen’s case, remembers receiving her. She had a broken pelvis and broken bones in her left arm. Fractures of her ribs and facial bones. She remained unconscious in intensive care for several days.
Her heart stopped on the way to Corvallis, Ramzy said. “My recollection I was told she had some 20 minutes of CPR.”
Ramzy wasn’t sure she’d survive the trip to Portland. Recovery was touch and go. When she was released in early October, she needed a walker and had trouble concentrating.
That’s when the struggle really began.
Ramzy said he saw a photograph of Mikkelsen’s husband taken while he was visiting at the hospital, but Mikkelsen said he bowed out of her life, getting rid of most of her personal possessions and saying he didn’t expect her to survive.
Eviction proceedings were under way at home for lack of rent. For a few days, she slept in a family vehicle, then borrowed $400 from a friend in Brookings for an old motor home, where she lived for a few months.
Senior Services had been in touch with Mikkelsen since shortly after the wreck, but earlier this year, the agency was ready to shut off access to medical care for lack of documentation. That’s when Lois Murphy, the caseworker, took over Mikkelsen’s paperwork.
“I was just so taken with her,” Murphy remembered. “Nobody was helping her. Nobody wanted to take the time to hear her story, find out why Social Security was denying her.”
Mikkelsen said the Albany Social Security office told her her appearance and her driver’s license didn’t match.
Try getting hit at 130 mph and see how good you look, she remembers saying.
Costarella, at the regional Social Security office, said the agency isn’t questioning the validity of the license. What they want is something else, something earlier, that proves Mikkelsen’s past.
Murphy is persisting. A 13-year employee with Senior Services, she said she’s learned to trust the “little man inside” who waves a red flag when someone lies to her. With Mikkelsen, she said, no little voice spoke up.
“It’s my job to believe her,” she said simply.
At the same time, however, Murphy said, she can’t do it all. She’s hoping other agencies can help track down her first marriage certificate or perhaps an early school photo.
Mikkelsen said she believes medical records alone should make her eligible for disability. She can stand for just a few minutes at a time, has trouble concentrating, and battles diabetes on the side.
“What kind of scam could I be running, is what I’d like to know?” she asked. “I’m held together with pins, Super Glue and duct tape.”
All she wants, she said, is enough income to secure a place to stay. Maybe that would help her battle the depression closing in.
“Some days I feel perfectly fine,” she said. “Yesterday I got pretty panicky. I felt like I was in a cage and I couldn’t get out.
“I’m not asking for anything,” she added. “I just need a little help to be a human being.”
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Re: NEED HELP WITH IDENTITY Angel Kandiess Lovell Mikkelsen, b Waco, TX 1963
Francine Black 4/09/12