Most people assume adult guardianship is something that happens to the elderly, after a long decline, with the family in the room. Increasingly, it is something that happens to young disabled adults, quickly, and over their family’s objection.
We have been watching a pattern repeat in Colorado’s probate and adult protective system. The details differ from family to family, but the shape is remarkably consistent — and once you have seen it a few times, it is hard to unsee.
The pattern
It usually starts with a report. An agency opens an investigation into an at-risk adult — someone with autism, an intellectual disability, a brain injury, a psychiatric history. A caseworker visits, sometimes with police.
For a person whose nervous system is already wired for threat, that visit is not a neutral fact-finding exercise. Uniforms, strangers, and the sense that something is about to happen can produce exactly the reaction the person is least able to control. They may freeze, bolt, shout, tic, lash out, or hurt themselves.
And then that reaction goes in the file.
Not as a trauma response to the intervention. As evidence about the person — proof that they are unsafe, unmanageable, or that the home they came from failed them. The intervention creates the crisis, and the crisis then justifies the intervention.
Context gets stripped out
Here is the part that should worry everyone, whether or not you have a disabled family member.
The same fact can mean opposite things depending on why it exists. A lock on a door can be confinement — or it can be a safety measure a therapist recommended because the person living there is terrified of being taken away again. A parent who intervenes constantly can be controlling — or can be the only person who knows how to prevent a meltdown from becoming a police call.
A file records the fact. It does not always record the reason. And by the time a case reaches a courtroom, the reason often has no one left to explain it, because the person who could — the parent — has been recast as the problem.
Opinions that outrun qualifications
Caseworkers are not clinicians. Most are not autism specialists, behavior analysts, or physicians. But in a hearing, a caseworker’s characterization of someone’s behavior, boundaries, or capacity for independence can carry enormous weight — sometimes more than the treating professionals who have worked with that person for years.
It is worth asking, every time: how many hours has this person actually spent with the individual they are describing? Under what conditions? And is the court hearing from the people who know them best, or only from the people who opened the file?
What the law actually requires
Colorado law does not treat guardianship as a default. A court is supposed to consider whether a person’s needs can be met by less restrictive means before stripping their decision-making rights and handing them to someone else. In-home services, behavioral supports, respite, a written safety plan, more caregiver help — these are supposed to be weighed first.
Families tell us those alternatives are frequently never documented as considered at all. The question worth pressing in any guardianship case is simple: what less restrictive options were evaluated, by whom, and why were they rejected?
Where it can end up
The most alarming version of this pattern is when a person removed from home “for their safety” ends up somewhere far less safe than where they started. An unfamiliar placement. A frightened reaction. A call to police. And then a disabled adult, who was supposed to be under the court’s protection, sitting in an adult jail.
If a protective system produces that outcome, the protection failed — no matter how procedurally correct each individual step looked on paper.
Why we sit in these hearings
Probate and guardianship hearings are generally open to the public, and almost nobody attends. They move fast. Families often appear without counsel, without knowing what the hearing is for, and without anyone in the room on their side.
Court watchers change that arithmetic. A few people sitting quietly in a gallery, taking notes, tends to slow things down and sharpen the record. It also means someone besides the family can describe what happened afterward.
It is also getting harder. As remote access is scaled back in some courtrooms, showing up in person is increasingly the only way to observe at all.
We are actively looking for court watchers. No legal background is required and we will train you. If you can spare a morning, join the court watch list — we send out hearing details as they come up, usually on short notice.
This piece describes patterns we observe across many cases. It is not about any single family, and it is not legal advice. If you are facing a guardianship proceeding, see Get Help.