Mary Annette Pember
ICT
Roberta Romero struggles to speak about the death of her sons.
She talks softly, in hushed tones, pausing sometimes as she describes how her eldest son, Lionel Sandoval, died in 2022 while trying to shake his addiction in one of Arizona’s sober living homes.
Her youngest, Ty, died by suicide in 2024 in what she believes was in response, at least in part, to his brother’s mysterious death.
Grieving the loss of her only children, she is left grasping for ways to go on while still seeking justice for Lionel’s death.
“I am all alone now,” Romero, Diné, told ICT by phone from her home in Farmington, New Mexico, on the eastern edge of the Navajo Nation.
Romero believes that Sandoval was among thousands of victims of a massive, multibillion-dollar sober living fraud scheme in Arizona and beyond that targeted mostly Native Americans by making false promises of addiction treatments that were never delivered.
More than 100 people, several companies and at least one church have been charged as part of a state and federal crackdown on Medicaid fraud and unlicensed sober living homes. In May 2025, Arizona officials charged another 20 people, accusing them of stealing $60 million in a sweeping fraud scheme that siphoned money from the state’s Medicaid program.
Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs and Attorney General Kris Mayes have called the scandal a “humanitarian crisis” and a “stunning failure of the government.”
Seeking justice
Romero filed a lawsuit in October against the state, the Salvation Army and the sober living home in Phoenix where Sandoval was living when he died in September 2022 at the age of 30.
The state of Arizona asked a judge to dismiss Romero’s lawsuit, claiming it fell outside the state’s six-month statute of limitations for wrongful death claims, but the Superior Court of Arizona in Maricopa County denied the state’s motion in August 2025.
Romero is represented by Jonodev Chaudhuri, a former chief justice for the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, with assistance from his wife, Mary Kathryn Nagle, a well-known Cherokee attorney.
The suit accuses the state of withholding victims’ records until the statute of limitations had passed.
“It’s insane to expect these victims to file claims within six months,” Nagle told ICT. “We said that the six-month window doesn’t apply here because of fraudulent concealment.”
A class-action lawsuit was also filed in December 2024 by the BrewerWood law firm against the state of Arizona for negligence and misconduct. The lawsuit contends that fraudulent billings to Medicaid had grown to $2.8 billion by 2023, with about 7,000 people victimized.
Officials say the fraud is ongoing in Arizona and in other states, and may be contributing to the rising numbers of missing and murdered Indigenous peoples. The number of deaths are unknown, though some reports put the deaths at more than 1,000.
Many of the victims and their families, like Romero, are struggling with daily survival, according to Nagle and Chaudhuri.
“If victims managed to escape the sober living homes, how can they be expected to find an attorney and file a lawsuit within six months?” Nagle asked. “A lawsuit isn’t always at the top of peoples’ minds when they are struggling to feed themselves.”
The two attorneys have been working with families to piece events together.
“Many of the people we spoke to were horribly traumatized,” Chaudhuri said. “They couldn’t recall where the homes were located; they reported being taken off the street, denied contact with family, and even given drugs at the homes.”
Ready to get sober
Sandoval was full of energy and always liked to help people, his mother told ICT.
“He loved cooking and building stuff,” she said.
But trouble started for him during his first year at San Juan College in Farmington, where he studied building and trades. He began isolating from others and his drinking escalated.
“He said, ‘I’m so tired, Mom. I really need some help,’” Romero said.
Initially, Sandoval was excited to begin treatment in Phoenix at a facility operated by the Salvation Army. “He completed treatment and was doing good but then they moved him to a sober living home,” Romero said.
According to the lawsuit, Sandoval did not receive treatment services or support at the sober living home operated by Falcons Care and related companies. The lawsuit accuses the operators and the Salvation Army of colluding to exploit Sandoval by fraudulently gaining access to his Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System and the American Indian Health Program benefits.
“He called me in September and said, ‘Mom, I just want to come home,’” she said. “I could tell he was teary-eyed. He wouldn’t tell me what was wrong; he seemed afraid.”
Romero told her son she would drive down to Phoenix, an eight-hour drive from Farmington, in a couple of days to pick him up. But two days later, she received a call from a doctor at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Phoenix urging her to come immediately; Lionel was in a coma after experiencing seizures at the home.
Romero arrived at the hospital early the next morning. Sandoval never woke up, and died soon after she arrived.
“I saw my son unconscious underneath all these wires going everywhere,” she said.
She said she repeatedly called the sober living home seeking details about what happened, but said no one ever called her back. Finally, joined by two nephews, she went to the home in person.
“I had a lot of questions and asked for his records,” she said.
Sandoval had no history of seizures or other health problems, Romero said. A woman who appeared to run the home informed Romero she needed to request Sandoval’s records in writing from the state of Arizona.
“As soon as they heard that Lionel had died, they stopped communicating with me,” Romero said.
At the urging of her nephews, Romero reached out to Chaudhuri and Nagle. When she finally received Sandoval’s autopsy report, Romero learned that her son had methanol in his blood.
Methanol, a simple form of alcohol, is the key ingredient in antifreeze. Highly toxic, it causes blindness or death when ingested. Romero couldn’t imagine that he would knowingly drink poison, and is wondering how it got into his system.
Growing numbers
Other victims of the sober living scam report similar stories in Arizona. Several victims have reported being kidnapped off the streets on reservations and towns by sober home recruiters. There have been reports of violence, of clients being force-fed drugs to keep them compliant, and of other deaths.
The state of Arizona began investigating the homes and cracking down on fraudulent operations in 2023. In June 2024, the U.S. Department of Justice launched an investigation into substance abuse treatment fraud against the Arizona Medicaid Program and the American Indian Health Plan. Some of the homes collected thousands of dollars a day in federal funds for bogus or shoddy services, according to officials.
But the state and federal government have been too slow in taking action, according to victims and advocates such as Reva Stewart of the Navajo Nation.
In an interview with reporter Shondiin Silversmith of the AZ Mirror, Stewart said the state has known for years about the problems.
“I want them to be held accountable,” she said. “I want accountability for every single person that was affected by this.”
Stewart’s business, Drumbeat Indian Arts, is located catty-corner from the Phoenix Indian Medical Center. In 2021, she began noticing white vans picking up people off the streets and decided to investigate.
Asking around the Native community, she learned that sober living homes were recruiting people, especially among the homeless, to participate in treatment.
About the same time, she noticed that reports of missing and murdered Indigenous peoples began skyrocketing. Stewart is involved with advocacy surrounding missing and murdered Indigenous people, and has for years kept a standing bulletin board outside her business on which people place posters seeking information about MMIP.
Responding to requests from community members, she has since expanded to more than a half-dozen boards to accommodate the posters.
Stewart and other members of the community began putting the pieces together as Native people from as far away as Montana, Alaska and Minnesota began showing up on Phoenix streets.
“They told us they’d been recruited for treatment and ended up getting stranded when the sober living homes kicked them out,” she told ICT.
As advocates from throughout the country contacted her nonprofit organization, Turtle Island Women Warriors, she began advising them to find out if the missing people they were seeking might have been recruited to participate in treatment.
Indeed, Navajo police began warning tribal citizens about sober living recruiters as reports of missing persons increased.
“We’re in 2026 now and we’re still on this hamster wheel;,” Stewart said. “No one is being held accountable for it.”
She reported that she has counted nearly 2,000 deaths related to the fraud and knows that number will only go up.
Spreading across the US
The sober living homes have now expanded into other locations throughout Indian Country, according to Stewart, Nagle and Chaudhuri, with Indigenous people from New Mexico and South Dakota also believed to have been targeted in the scam.
In December 2025, the Minnesota Indian Women’s Center issued a safety alert about recruiters for sober living homes targeting the state’s Indigenous population. Several Native people reported being approached by men claiming to represent a treatment center and sober living facility in San Francisco, offering them immediate transportation, according to Ruth Buffalo, a citizen of the Mandan Hidatsa Arikara Nation and president of the center.
The men also visited the women’s center, dropping off flyers about the California facilities. But they were evasive when workers asked for details. It’s unclear how many people may have agreed to go to California with the men.
There are many unhoused Native people in the Twin Cities, some of whom would be vulnerable to promises to get them into treatment within 24 hours.
“There’s a lot of people who want to get off the streets and out of active addiction,” Buffalo said. “When some people hear they can get immediate access to treatment, housing and food out in California, they are likely to say, ‘Sure.’”
Buffalo and the center are cautioning the public to verify any offers of treatment, especially those that include transportation.
“We have some good organizations here that offer treatment, including the Native American Community Clinic and providers from the White Earth reservation,” she said.
Seeking justice
Chaudhuri and Nagle have chosen to include the fraudulent homes in Romero’s and other clients’ lawsuits mostly as a matter of principle.
“There’s not a lot of money there, most of the homes were part of shell corporations that were set up specifically to commit fraud,” Nagle said. “The people who took the money mostly live overseas, have no assets or insurance, so naming them in the suit won’t result in any real payments for our clients.”
But they hope that naming them in the lawsuit will deter predatory action by others in the future. “We want to do everything we can to have a chilling effect on bad actors who want to take advantage of our communities,” Nagle said.
Romero, meanwhile, has been struggling with depression since the deaths of her sons.
“Sometimes I hide out in my room and just sleep, that’s my escape,” she said.
She was fired from her job in retail shortly after Lionel’s death. “I kept breaking down and walking out so they stopped working with me,” Romero said.
But she was recently hired by another retailer and spends her down time reading books about how parents survive the deaths of their children. Romero hopes her lawsuit will help stop the fraud and predation for others.
“There are so many of us out there,” she said, pausing briefly before continuing.
“All I can do is get up everyday and hope for the best.”
The Associated Press contributed to this story.