Bing agrees: Ex-Lions star Lem Barney to stay put after Oakland judge denies family wishes

The hearing ended, three lawyers scooted and a Zoom screen aglow with witnesses went dark. Now it was just the judge and Dave Bing, the former NBA star and mayor of Detroit.

Bing gathered his things, mulling yet another trying episode in the drama of his lifelong friend Lem Barney, who lies in a nursing home in Houston while family members seek control of the care and assets of this legend of Detroit Lions football.

Bing had tried, often behind the scenes, to see that Barney’s life ends in dignity and good care. Thursday’s hearing in Oakland County Probate Court didn’t go the way Bing at first said he wished. But he changed his mind, and so did the judge, after hearing live testimony from Texas.

At last, Barney’s future was decided. All agreed it was for the better — all except Barney’s irate son and his ex-wife, whose battered credibility had been further shredded. The courtroom was nearly empty when Probate Judge Daniel O’Brien flashed a smile and said, “Before you leave, Mr. Bing, I have to ask you. What’s going on with the Pistons? They’re terrible!” Bing replied, “Yes, they are and it's shocking. I’m going down there tonight. I really hope they can beat Utah. I’ve offered to mentor some of them. They need leadership.”

O’Brien said, “It can’t be the pay. Even a second-string guard makes, what, a million a year?” Bing chuckled, shaking his head, and said, “No, 3 million.” He added, “I never made that much in my whole career,” and turned to a reporter with a smirk. Looking back at the judge, he went on: “They make plenty of money — maybe too much. That business has become all about the money. These days, it’s just all about the money.”

For 55 years, Bing the basketball star has befriended Barney the football star. Barney is 78 and troubled by incipient early-stage dementia, blamed on a career of battering concussions. “We were close from the start,” Bing told a reporter after Thursday’s hearing. Bing, along with former Lion Lomas Brown, has stuck by Barney, both serving at different times as co-guardians.

Bing’s latest hope, for much of this year, and at the start of Thursday’s hearing, was that Barney’s son could once again become his father’s guardian, and that Barney could move from a busy nursing home in Houston to the privacy of his ex-wife’s house on the other side of town. At that house, Barney’s son has said in several hearings, family members would care for their ailing patriarch.

But was it all about the money? At the last hearing, in late September, that house was revealed by Barney’s professional guardian to be in foreclosure. The shock of that discovery froze everything. At the hearing, Bing’s lawyer spoke up about that: “Mr. Bing has taken care of that. Mr. Bing paid that.”

With foreclosure out of the way, the judge still had bumps ahead. O’Brien had to persuade himself that, despite his earlier concerns about Lem Barney’s son and ex-wife, maybe their plea and Bing’s wish to have Barney “back in his home with his family” was workable. Yet, questions about the family’s motives had loomed for a year. The judge called them red flags, and sometimes red lights. Barney’s son, Lem Barney III, wanted control and care back after O’Brien removed him as guardian when he’d mismanaged his father’s care and financial affairs while failing to communicate with the judge, according to court records.

Overseeing a case 1,300 miles away was not ideal, the judge had said in previous hearings. O’Brien is a veteran on the probate bench, seemingly as patient as the day of the hearing was short — it being the winter solstice — and possesses an undergraduate degree in electrical engineering. He said that he rued ever permitting Barney to visit Texas, supposedly to visit his grandchildren. That visit last year became, inexplicably, permanent. It provided Barney’s children and ex-wife the chance to keep him there, in violation of O’Brien’s court orders that Barney be brought home to Michigan, to his second wife, Jacci Barney, and their house in Commerce Township. The machinations by the Texans had Barney’s relatives in other states claiming last year on social media that the former Detroit Lions great had been “kidnapped” by renegade family members, including Barney’s ex-wife, Martha Barney.

In the months since, the senior Lem Barney had become too sickly to be moved back to Michigan, according to reports of professional caregivers in Texas. Barney was mired in Texas, even as his probate case was mired in Oakland County; Texas authorities refuse to take it on, O’Brien had said.

The family’s missteps caused the judge to remove the son, and his sister, who had been co-guardians, and to put in charge Clarkston lawyer Jon Munger, who handles numerous guardianships. The care of the aging footballer, judged by Free Press sportswriters to be the fourth-best Detroit Lion in history, is covered by Medicare and by payments from the NFL, Munger said, in an interview before the latest hearing. Barney also is thought to have received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the NFL, about eight years ago, as part of a class-action settlement in the highly publicized lawsuit by retired players, who said they’d been brain-damaged by concussions. Where is that money now?

“I don’t know. I came into this after that was gone, I guess,” Munger told a reporter in September.

More: Lem Barney should be at Ford Field today, not in a messy court battle | Opinion

For the last year, Barney’s son wanted not only to become guardian but also to move his father from a nursing home in Houston, where he lies almost unable to move or speak, to the Houston home of Barney’s ex-wife, where he lived for a time in 2022, and where Barney’s son had been living ever since he filed earlier this year for divorce, according to court testimony at a hearing in September. Bing had said in previous hearings that he supported that move.

But the home of Barney’s ex-wife, Martha Barney, is where Barney was physically neglected and abused by her, during his brief stay there while visiting to see his grandchildren last year — at least according to Texas adult protective services, and according to a video that may have been filmed by one of Barney’s visiting nurses. No one knows, O’Brien said from the bench. He allowed Barney’s son to toss a Hail Mary at explaining away that video, which shows his mother striking her ex-husband.

“You weren’t there, were you?” O’Brien asked Lem Barney III. “No, I wasn’t, but ..., “ Lem Barney III continued talking. O’Brien, at first patiently, then insistently, asked him to stop. With silence regained, the judge spoke: “That film was good enough for adult protective services, good enough for the police, good enough for a prosecutor, and good enough that a judge set bond” for Martha Barney. Charges ultimately were dismissed. Still, the incident became part of the growing web of worries for Lem Barney’s future.

Barney’s current wife, whom the former football star, addled by concussions, named as his preferred guardian a decade ago, is no longer “suitable and willing,” as called for in state law. Jacci Barney for much of this year has lived in an assisted living residence in Oakland County, after she was diagnosed with schizophrenia, according to Barney’s current guardian, Munger, and according to Jacci’s own lawyer, who also was at Thursday’s hearing.

The entire case highlights the need for ethical professional guardians when family members can’t be trusted to oversee the welfare of a loved one who needs assistance, Munger told a reporter before the hearing.

Then came two final blows. Reports from Houston, from the key caregivers for Barney — professional staff who visit the nursing home — said that the ex-wife of the senior Lem Barney had told her former husband, during a visit, that he should come home to live with her. A caregiver reported that Barney, usually nonverbal, had become alert enough to shout, “No, no, no!”  A second report from the caregivers was that the football star’s son, Lem Barney III, during another visit to see his father, had spoken sharply to the caregivers and words to the effect of, “You are all bitches living off my family, and we are getting nothing.”

O’Brien, apparently taken aback by both reports, requested the phone number for the chief caregiver, wanting to hear whether her testimony affirmed the shocking reports. None of the lawyers had her number. Bing sprang to his feet, found his briefcase and provided it. O’Brien’s clerk dialed, and reached the woman in Houston. She not only backed up the reports, but she also said that she and her staff were so upset by what they’d seen and heard of Barney’s son and ex-wife that they would decline to treat him if he were moved to the ex-wife’s house.

That did it, for Bing and O’Brien both. Suddenly, all in the courtroom favored leaving Barney where he was, pending the chance a month from now that he could be moved to a more private setting, where the same caregivers would continue with treatment that, reports said, were healing his bedsores. O’Brien agreed to let Lem Barney’s son become co-guardian again, although that merely means that he will have access to more reports about his father’s care and financial status. The judge stipulated that Lem Barney III is to have no say in his father’s care and no control of financial assets.

When it ended, and the courtroom was almost empty, Bing and the judge exchanged jolly holiday wishes. They also exchanged sober wishes for the Pistons to be gifted with some wins.

“I don’t know what it’ll take,” Bing said.

“I really don’t think the players need more money. Everything these days is just too much about the money.”

Contact Bill Laytner: blaitner@freepress.com

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: An Oakland County judge just ruled that ex-Lion Lem Barney stays put