"We've used her for several years," hospital spokeswoman Renee Gould said. "She has been very professional and more than satisfactory."

A former flight attendant and lingerie importer, Preston, 35, built a private guardianship business partly on referrals from Northwest Regional. Six of the 19 elderly people under her care, including Jablonsky, were Northwest Regional patients, Gould said.

Two weeks ago, Preston pleaded guilty to eight felonies for stealing from two of those patients: Jablonsky, a retired bookkeeper, and Morris Kline, 80, a printer who retired to Florida from Brooklyn, then suffered a stroke.

Preston won legal control of her elderly victims by vowing to take care of them, then used their credit cards to shop for herself. Three weeks after Kline died, she used his Sears charge card to buy a dishwasher and have it installed in her Sunrise home.

Preston tried to take guardianship of Kline's mildly retarded adult son as well and threatened to institutionalize him, relatives said. She ran up about $10,000 in guardianship and legal fees for father and son in a few months. Kline's relatives blame a Northwest Regional social worker for bringing Preston into their lives over their protests.

"I'm so bitter at that woman," said Abe Hecker, Kline's brother-in-law, who lives in New York. "She has no idea what havoc and pain and anguish she has created by her actions."

Gould, of Northwest Regional, said she could not discuss individual patients because of confidentiality.

A review of all guardianship cases filed in the first two months of 1993 in Broward shows that more than 40 percent of the men and women who underwent incapacity proceedings were in a hospital when the process began. Typically, a hospital social worker contacted professional guardians and told them about patients' medical problems, court records indicate.

Nearly 20 percent of those Broward hospital patients died before their incapacity hearings, scheduled so a court hearing officer could determine whether patients could take care of themselves or needed permanent guardians.

Similar countywide information for Dade is unavailable because of the manner in which Metro-Dade maintains its guardianship records.

Jackson Memorial, the only public hospital in Dade, does keep records that allow comparison. Jackson initiated guardianship proceedings for 27 patients last year. None died before a judge ruled on whether they were competent, hospital records show.

Broward court officials expressed concern at the high death rate in Broward and said they could offer no explanation other than that the patients were old and had health problems.

But Marlene Pinsky, a county attorney who handles guardianships for Jackson Memorial, said she knows why the hospital's patients are not dying before their court hearings. Jackson Memorial, she said, does not try to discharge patients so ill that they are in danger of dying before an incapacity hearing. "If they are that acute, we keep them, and we keep treating them," she said. One of the largest private guardianship companies in the state, South Florida Guardianship Program, works primarily with men and women coming out of hospitals.

The private, nonprofit corporation has responsibility for more than 200 elderly or disabled people, and more than half came from hospital referrals, president Kathleen Phillips said. Last year, area hospitals and those elderly wards paid the company more than half a million dollars in guardianship fees, 1993 tax returns show.