Anna Sitte lost her life's savings to swindle, her ability to recognize family members to dementia and, at 78, is about to lose what's left of the farm her family settled a century ago.

"What she has is a measure of dignity," her son Jimmy said. "There are lots of ways to measure justice, but I tell the prosecutors that they did something good."

The family, however, has been torn apart. Jimmy's brother, Steven Carl Sitte, 53, of New Hope, is serving six months in the Hennepin County workhouse after pleading guilty to swindling their mother, who has Alzheimer's disease.

He was turned in by Jimmy.

Anna Sitte is expected to be moved within weeks to a nursing home in Wahpeton, along the Minnesota border and 12 miles from her North Dakota farm. It's an assisted-living complex that Jimmy said Anna really can't afford.

Jimmy said he will probably sell the three remaining acres of the 188-acre family farm to help the state of Minnesota pay for his mother's assisted-living home. With her medication, Anna's monthly living expenses are expected to reach $7,000, he said.

An inheritance for sale

"The judge ruled that my brother owed my mother $274,000 in restitution, but I doubt they're ever going to see a penny of it because he's broke," said Jimmy Sitte, a musician who lives modestly. "So they're giving me six months to decide if I want to buy or sell the farm to use the money to help pay for my mother's expenses.

"Buying your own inheritance is wild. This whole thing has been wild."

Anna Sitte's Alzheimer's disease was diagnosed long before she moved to New Hope in 2005, where she lived with Steve. As her dementia worsened, she was declared medically incapable of understanding or signing financial documents.

How, then, could Anna have written two checks in 2007 totaling nearly $100,000 to a business associate of Steven's? Why would Anna, who then had few expenses of her own, sell the family's century-old farm and then allow her bank account to evaporate?

In court records, authorities alleged that Steven Sitte, unemployed and $300,000 in debt, forged his mother's name 17 times on checks totaling $136,000. Last September, he pleaded guilty to one felony count of theft by swindle, while three other charges were dismissed.

"Steve is the principal caregiver, the only caregiver," his attorney, Marshall Tanick, said in Hennepin County District Court last October. "Everyone agrees that Steve's been an excellent caregiver. It's become his mission in life." Attempts to reach Tanick recently were unsuccessful.

But for Jimmy Sitte, his mother had become one of 5 million Americans who fall victim to elder abuse each year, according to the Elder Justice Coalition in Washington. Of those cases, nearly one-fifth involve financial exploitation. The victims are most often women between 75 and 80.

Money, land and blood

It wasn't just the disappearance of more than $300,000 that prompted Jimmy Sitte to turn in his brother. It was the land. And the blood.

This was about a 188-acre farm that the Sitte family had settled in 1912, land that Jimmy said his father, Carl Sitte, forbade others to sell. This was also about Anna's depleted bank accounts, which Jimmy said contained funds from her pensions and Social Security, plus $274,500 from the 2007 sale of the farm that he said was never supposed to be sold.

Anna Sitte fell into a dark depression after her husband died in 2002, Jimmy said. By 2004, she was living in an assisted-living facility in Moorhead.

Back to the farm

Jimmy said he moved his mother to the farm in 2005 to live with him. But when Jimmy, a guitar and mandolin player, signed to play a show in Wisconsin, he said he asked if he could bring Anna to Steve's home in New Hope to visit.

Anna stayed in New Hope. The farm was sold on a quitclaim deed filed in Hennepin County on May 27, 2007, with Anna Sitte listed as the seller.

"The damn Alzheimer's had taken so much from her," Jimmy Sitte said before going to court. "How could my brother, our own flesh and blood, take away nearly everything else from her?"

Jimmy said that Anna, who turns 79 in May, no longer recognizes him or her cat of 10 years. But otherwise, she's in great health and good spirits.

"She's going to a place that's great for her, very safe and secure," Jimmy said. "It's where she should have been two years ago."

Paul Levy • 612-673-4419