Save Your Own Life

Growing up, Jaki says she was always "daddy's little girl." She says her parents always gave her everything she could ever ask for. When her mother died and her 90-year-old father developed dementia and couldn't speak due to a series of minor strokes, Jaki arranged for full-time, in-home care and installed cameras to check on the caregivers. "At that time, I didn't trust anybody," she says. "I wanted to make sure that the people I hired took care of him and weren't stealing from us or anything like that."

After hiring a woman named Anastasia to help with her father, Jaki says she checked the recordings for about two weeks. After that, her close monitoring fell off because of her busy lifestyle and because she came to trust Anastasia. "Anastasia was the type of person that I actually liked and got along with in the house," Jaki says. "I mean, I treated her like family."

After several weeks of not watching the surveillance tapes, Jaki was in her basement, doing her father's laundry. Also in the basement was the recording equipment. She says she suddenly felt compelled to watch the tapes. "Even in the rush that I'm in, I turn around, and I go back over to this DVR. And I said, 'Okay, I'm going to watch and see what exactly happened this morning," she says.