Life and Death in Assisted Living (full documentary) | FRONTLINE

[Music] tonight on frontline assisted living is home to almost a million american seniors and it's a multi-billion dollar business when the baby boomers start hitting we're looking to service that demand as it continues to grow seniors are paying sky-high prices out of their own pockets you can charge five thousand six thousand seven thousand dollars a month over the last year frontline and propublica have been investigating this growing industry you don't have to worry about federal government rules and regulations like you have to with a nursing home and the country's largest assisted living company they did not have the state required training they didn't have the emeritus required training and examining the care this for-profit chain provides to tens of thousands of seniors the biggest thing i always heard was we need 100 percent fill the building 100 correspondent ac thompson interviews insiders who are telling their stories for the first time did you worry hey i've got an impossible task here i could do something that leads to somebody's death all the time tonight on frontline life and death in assisted living the head of a state licensing agency told me assisted living is the rock we don't want to look under [Music] so this is 1940 is that right yes this was the championship game yeah look there he is there he is carrying the ball yeah that's daddy number five yeah is that him yes he's got the ball right there there he goes yeah he just intercepted that and now is just running and making his way through yeah and just scored touchdown i believe this is when they scored the score was 73 to nothing it was a game that daddy talked about the most i think george mcafee had a remarkable life in the 1940s and 50s he was the star running back for the chicago bears he won three nfl championships and was inducted into the pro football hall of fame he didn't really talk about that that much in fact our mother he my mother wanted to place plaques of his in our den and the only place he would let her put them was behind this door so that when the door was open you couldn't see them i see all these photos and he seems like he's just loving his later years he enjoyed being around his family he would just light up when he saw the grandkids the great grandkids but in his 70s george became one of the more than 5 million americans suffering from dementia i guess we first started noticing that there were some changes in daddy's behavior he would go to the bank and he could get there but once he got there he couldn't remember why he was there his daughters began searching for a facility that could care for their father they chose cypress court an assisted living home that charged more than four thousand dollars a month when i saw the court a couple things impressed me the residents were free to access the outside and walk or sit i thought we had just struck gold as far as a home for him but then the facility was bought by the emeritus corporation a nationwide chain the sisters say they began to see changes his room would be dirty and he would just be unkept like he hadn't showered i know for a fact that his sheets weren't being changed his laundry was not being done i would come home with his laundry do his laundry myself i would clean his room many times when i would go over and he hadn't showered he looked like a dirty old man one night george left his room and went wandering through the facility records show that for almost half an hour there was no one on duty in his wing of the building and workers had failed to lock away a bottle of industrial strength dishwashing liquid at some point that night george picked it up and drank it [Music] it contained a highly caustic chemical which severely burned his lips esophagus and lungs he was in the hospital his face almost looked like what you picture in a horror story of a death mask and i hope that he wasn't aware of what was going on um but we certainly were afraid that he was just in horrific pain because he would almost try to sit up well one time he did sit up he did sit up and opened his eyes yeah and we and we said daddy we're right here the hospital couldn't save george and on march 4th 2009 he died [Music] the state of georgia found emeritus negligent in george's death [Music] the sisters sued the company and settled with them now they're speaking publicly for the first time he suffered a horrific death and our children saw it her husband saw it we saw it and i remember just sitting by his bedside praying that that god would just go ahead and take him because he wasn't going to get any better and i just felt like he was suffering so horribly after your father died the state did an investigation and the state said we're going to find this facility 601. well in my opinion i think they just got a slap on the wrist and i've said all along had this been a daycare facility that where a child died the place would have been shut down to only get a fine of 601 dollars i just think is outrageous it means nothing nothing the emeritus corporation is headquartered here in seattle washington we asked the ceo granger cobb about what happened to george mcafee the incident with the tragedy i should say with mr mcafee was was devastating for all of us and it was a situation it was human error we had a staff member that that failed to secure a a locked cupboard um mr mcafee got access to this dishwashing liquid drank it and and had absolutely tragic results and our heart goes out to the family when you're dealing with with this many [Music] residents particularly a population that that can have unpredictable behavior or is is frail and and has is is kind of a high risk population to begin with we we will have situations from time to time but they they're the they're the vast you know minority i mean it is it is really the exception to the rule welcome to emeritus where you'll find all the comforts of home cobb heads a company that has long been at the forefront of the assisted living industry you you can teach the skills but you can't teach the passion you have to have a passion for c offers a full spectrum assisted living was created to offer seniors who could no longer live on their own a more home-like environment than nursing homes and since most facilities offered little or no medical care they were loosely regulated to enjoy their golden years to the fullest assisted living blew up in the 1990s it grew very rapidly do you think that companies were attracted to this sector of senior care because it had less regulation than nursing homes oh i'm sure and particularly the for-profit companies when you look at a system you don't have to worry about federal government you don't have to worry about rules and regulations like you have to with a nursing home for example and you can charge whatever the market can bear i mean if people are willing to pay five thousand six thousand seven thousand dollars a month for care you can charge that and there's no limitations on fee increases with those kind of prices and the enormous cash flow they generate emeritus has been embraced by wall street the company shares trade on the new york stock exchange last year it took in nearly 1.6 billion dollars in revenue and with the baby boomers starting to retire emeritus is looking to grow even bigger so the 75 plus demographic is growing by about 400 000 individuals per year so there's this this increasing demand and and frankly out 15 years when the baby boomers start hitting it's going to grow by a million a year and so there's this huge demand that is already here and and on the horizon is going to increase and and i think that you know what we're looking at is to be able to service that demand as it continues to grow but increasingly that demand has been coming from seniors with complex medical problems when we were trying to figure out what assisted living is or was i had this image that it was apartment-style buildings where people had a lot of independence they didn't need a lot of assistance catherine haw studies the assisted living industry and then we did the first national study and of course that wasn't what assisted living was people showed up in wheelchairs and walkers it wasn't the well elderly who were out golfing you know on the weekends and you know there was this big of us a is there a parking place for every resident these are not people who can drive and there was these spiral staircases which no one ever uses because if all you need is hospitality you don't leave your home most of us want to stay in our home as long as we can in her study for the department of health and human services haws found that while residents in assisted living didn't have as many physical limitations as people in nursing homes many suffered from alzheimer's and other forms of dementia when you go into assisted living you see a lot of cognitive impairment so there's a lot of early memory loss short-term memory loss a lot of impaired decision making newer research shows that the number of residents with dementia is rapidly increasing we found that about two-thirds at any point in time have dementia so the majority and the implications therefore are anybody who operates assisted living needs to know that dementia is the major player it's the major condition that leads to people to living there hello to meet the growing demand for dementia care emeritus has been opening memory care facilities across the country understanding how alzheimer's disease affects the brain but though residents now need much more care assisted living remains loosely regulated the overall needs of each resident now we pretend assisted living facilities are not medical facilities they're non-medical and yet the people who are in these facilities today have acute medical needs the same people who are in assisted living today are the people who were in nursing homes 10 years ago and this is not to say that all the facilities aren't prepared to deal with them but i'd say the overwhelming majority certainly aren't prepared to deal with that emeritus invited us to come to one of their facilities in san diego it has a memory care unit seniors can pay upwards of five thousand dollars a month to live in a place like this so we're in the memory care unit or memory care community we call the medicare neighborhood memory care neighborhood in carmel valley kelly scott runs emeritus memory care program so this is our program we called our join their journey program and this is where we're caring for folks with dementia and it's really a specialized program to meet their needs we find out a lot about who they are as individuals and then the day is set up around what is purposeful and meaningful to them as individuals get ready but some question whether memory care units like this one provide enough care has anyone got a shovel you're gonna have a memory care unit that's a good marketing tool for families hey there's demand and you're trying to keep occupancy up and b you can charge more for memory care i mean all you've really done is created rooms around a courtyard but still that's nice and it's much safer but then they say they've got staff who are trained to do memory care and that's where it starts to kind of fall apart because the staff are generally not well trained to do dementia care and layout for me if we're here in carmel valley or at your facility what would the typical training consist of for somebody in this facility um who's working particularly in memory care and the memory care unit okay um for our staff that works in memory care they're gonna go through what we call general orientation which everybody in the community would go through and then we have an eight-hour class that's the join their journey class and that's really where we cover everything from disease process to how we serve a meal slightly differently to folks who have dementia to how to engage how to approach how to communicate you know overcoming some communication barriers at times so the eight-hour intro is sort of the minimum that's our company's standard is going to be the eight hour eight hours that's nothing who's going to explain this is what the disease is this is the impact that it has on people's physical health and on their behaviors you've got to know how to interpret nonverbal cues that something's going on with this resident because they can't tell you verbally you know in the same way that a two-year-old can't tell you we're a one-year-old i mean you've got to do a lot of training for memory care units you can do great care you just you got to know how i think the challenge for us honestly for the past year propublican frontline have been examining assisted living and emeritus the industry's biggest chain which is home to more than forty thousand seniors resident was assaulted by another resident due to lack of care by facility substantiated there's no national data on assisted living so we focused on california the state with the most assisted living facilities during the last three years emeritus had more substantiated consumer complaints per bed than any of its major competitors facility has insufficient staff to monitor residents we found authorities in other states have cited emeritus for numerous legal violations from a shortage of staff to taking in seniors too sick to legally live in their buildings go to that one at oceanside you just have somebody apparently falling out of a second story window and we identified more than two dozen questionable deaths many of which have never been reported on so she she froze to death she froze on christmas day on christmas day her name was mabel austin and she suffered from dementia one night she wandered out of an emeritus facility in texas and froze to death in colorado herbert packard was beaten to death by a resident with brain damage in massachusetts angenette stewart was repeatedly sexually assaulted an investigation found that emeritus workers knew about the attacks and didn't stop them in florida richard borac who had alzheimer's slipped out of a facility one day and was never seen again when we asked emeritus to comment on these incidents the company refused [Music] but granger cobb did agree to comment generally on the problems we'd found at his company it's a fact of life and it's it's not peculiar to assisted living versus any other business but from time to time human beings will make mistakes but some things are pretty are pretty cut and dry in some states if you have a particular condition you can't be in a facility in some states if you are posing an immediate harm to yourself or others you can't be in an assisted living facility what are the risks of having somebody who has a prohibited condition something that should keep them out of assisted living living in this kind of environment well if if we can't adequately care for the resident we shouldn't have them if we cannot care for them sufficiently we will not jeopardize their their health or their condition by keeping them in our community but in our reporting we came across a revealing incident near jackson mississippi it involved a woman with dementia named merle fall merle went to live at emeritus at ridgeland point at the end of a long happy life she was a lot of fun to be around our friends all always loved her she said whatever came to mind she was always the life of the party you know she just everybody always loved her in the early stages of her dementia merle lived with diane's sister linda but when linda felt she could no longer keep merle safe the sisters called emeritus the company sent a nurse to evaluate merle she came in she sat down right there on the couch with mother mother was sitting there too she reached over and held mother's hand and she never asked any questions as a matter of fact it was only later that i understood she was here to evaluate mother to find out whether she was suitable for ridgeland point because all she did was talk about what a great experience it was going to be mother was going to get a lot of one-on-one attention she said she's going to get so tired of seeing my face uh you know we're going to give her we're going to take care of her just like she was our mother that's what they said and so merle's daughters moved their mom in at a cost of about thirty five hundred dollars a month she went in on thursday afternoon february 25th they had suggested that we not come by for a few days to get her used to it sunday i finally said we want to see her we got there she was drugged drooling we couldn't wake her up she had on the same clothes she had on when we took her there thursday she smelled her urine i mean she looked like she had just been drugged the whole time the sisters discussed taking merle home but in the end decided not to move her she was miserable where she was and she wanted to go home and it was really hard to leave her there but we truly thought it was the best thing for her we truly thought it was a way to keep her safe but just days later merle stuffed her clothes into a suitcase and told a caregiver that she was leaving soon after she apparently pried open an upstairs window in the memory care unit and forced herself through it then she plunged to the ground i got a call on saturday march the 6th nine days after she was admitted there about 10 to late that morning said the lady identified herself and said your mother got out i said what do you mean she got out she said she went out the window i said she went out of second story when and she said yes i said is she breathing is she alive she's on the ground crawling around she won't get up we probably got there in less than 10 minutes as a matter of fact they were still putting her in the ambulance when we got there there was not one living soul from ridgeland point out there with her nobody from ridgeland point ever came outside and said anything to us nobody expressed any regret because they never walked out the front door we never saw them at the hospital doctors discovered that merle had bleeding in her brain three days later she died soon after the sisters filed a lawsuit against emeritus some cynical people will say diane and linda they're suing because they want money because they want to enrich themselves they see a big corporation and they want some money what do you say to that i'd say shut the facility down for the people in jail we'll drop the lawsuit because we don't have any well it's not the money it's truly not the money but the money is all that matters to emeritus and if that's all that matters to them it's the only way to hurt them and believe me i want to hurt them the daughter's lawsuit against emeritus is ongoing but mississippi regulators decided not to cite or find emeritus for merle's death that was one where we actually followed our policies and procedures they had checked all the windows in the community to make sure that none of them opened past 12 inches which is the regulation in in the state of mississippi but it's so difficult sometimes with our residents that may have some memory impairment sometimes their behavior is unpredictable and and catches staff off guard even when they think they're doing all the right things but maggie carter who ran the memory care unit at the time and was later fired in a dispute with the company told us that merle's death reflected a bigger problem i think that they are bringing nursing home patients to a assisted living facility most patients that was in the wheelchairs or not able to assist themselves at all should have been in a nursing home not an assistant care why do you think she was admitted at the time this is my opinion we was low on residents and we need to keep up our numbers they was very um strict about numbers that we need to keep up our numbers and at the time memory care didn't have the capacity they wanted so you still was under pressure to get people in that building when you get them in their building you was under pressure to keep them in their building at any cost emeritus insists it only admits those who are medically suitable but we talked to more than a dozen other former employees tell me what i should know who described a company focused on filling its buildings and some said the company was willing to put seniors at risk to do it okay now several former emeritus employees have agreed to talk on camera for the first time it looks like a nice building on the outside but inside you know everybody's just like scrambling to do the best they can you know to take care of all these these people in 2007 nurse mary kasuba was the resident care director at emeritus at emerald hills in northern california she says the facility was so understaffed that it couldn't provide decent care for the roughly 80 seniors living there it was just very dysfunctional and not very organized and the residents were not getting the care that they should be getting and give them the kind of care that they were they were paying for because you know they paid quite a lot of money to be able to be in that facility kasuba's biggest worry was the med room it was managed by workers with little training who were paid around 10 an hour like jenny hit so for 80 or more residents how many drugs are we talking about i mean how how many prescriptions could you conceivably be dealing with oh my goodness thousands um some residents at one time can have 15 different prescriptions and different bills that they get and some of them get pills uh four or five six times a day there's times where i had to run down the hallways to make sure that this person is gonna get their medication and some of these medications are life or death did you worry hey i've got an impossible task here i could mess up and actually do something that leads to somebody's death all the time mary kasuba grew so concerned by the lack of staff she sent a registered letter to corporate headquarters saying that unless improvements were made she would resign since i came to work with emerald hills there has not been enough staff to cover any part of the day-to-day staffing needs to give the residents their quality of care that emerald hills advertises in its information not enough in the kitchen housekeeping resident assistances and med techs my biggest concern is the med room staff that was in place before i was employed were placed in positions that are beyond their capacity they have been placed in the med room without significant training and support for their position a quick fix for a sinking ship [Music] so you send this letter you send it to your boss at the facility you send it to the executives in seattle did any of them ever respond to you or addressed these concerns in any way no nobody responded at all the letters that i sent to the corporate offices that i sent you know return receipt requested and i called and made telephone calls nobody responded nobody and so kasuba quit the executive vice president for quality services at emeritus is boo giamparo a nurse named mary kasuba wrote you a letter she was concerned that there weren't enough staff in the med room that they didn't have enough training that they weren't paid well enough and that something bad could happen as a result right um you know that building over time had had many changes i'm not gonna you know deny that now with with ms kasuba's letter it's just too unfortunate that that she felt that way we have a lot of platform that we have in place to allow our staff to express concern we have this system called ethics first it's a compliance line where you could call the 800 number and and enlarge your complaint if you wanted to be anonymous you could be anonymous jenny hitt says she called ethics first multiple times about what was going on at emerald hills somehow they would find out that it was me and i would get questioned why didn't you bring it to us don't call ethics first so even though the company had an ethics hotline what you're telling me is your bosses said don't call the ethics hotline well in like meetings and stuff they're like oh you can always call ethics but when it came down to you calling ethics and they found out you called ethics it was a big deal because they were mad a big deal in a not good way no not good way eventually emeritus fired jenny hit so the company says you made a medication error that's why we fired you yeah you don't buy that i don't buy it what do you think the real reason is because i was raising too much trouble i i was calling ethics and corporate and i was even talking to family members be like hey your mom and ted aren't getting this you know you need to get them out and they didn't like that even as hit and nurse kasuba were telling emeritus the staff couldn't handle the workload the company was trying to get more seniors in the building melissa gracio was the lead salesperson the biggest thing i always heard was 100 percent we need 100 you know always you know fill the building 100 percent gave me a lot of anxiety because my philosophy wasn't to move in a warm body just to fill the building my philosophy was to make sure it was a right fit with the person the prospective resident moving in and that is one thing that was hard for me is because they wanted a a hard close after every single person i met with do you think the company ever moved in people who were not a good fit for the building that they needed services the building couldn't provide i do joan boyce was one senior gracious regrets moving in these photos are some of my favorites just this one of my mom this was when she first came out here in the early 50s just kind of shows her kind of the carefree you know and her adventurous spirit that you know just to come out here as a single woman but yeah she was just free spirited and and uh and confident and i think that you know throughout these these decades of pictures here um i see that time and time again then when she was in her 70s joan began to show signs of dementia you know there are certain pictures where you could almost see it in her eyes um that something just wasn't quite right jones dementia grew much worse she had trouble talking she needed assistance walking and she needed help eating in 2007 her family moved her into a facility they were happy with but it was a long drive emerald hills was close and promised great care to be able to spend more time with joan they moved her but some of the staff didn't think emerald hills could care for joan she should never came you don't think she should have been admitted to your facility where do you think she should have gone skilled nursing why she couldn't walk she couldn't feed herself she barely even talked to us and her health wasn't that good um and we told them she needs to go to skilled so you told the boss joan boyce needs to go to a skilled nursing home yeah what happened um they said we can take care of their needs she doesn't she doesn't need to move eric boyce's father spent part of every day with his wife he began to worry that she wasn't getting the care she needed he told his son my dad said hey you know they're they're not treating mom well and most of it i thought i dismissed i i wanted to believe that that couldn't be happening there was a good deal of denial but after three months at emerald hills it was clear to everyone that jones health had declined dramatically finally she was moved to a nursing home and it was there that doctors discovered that joan had an array of life-threatening wounds people that go how would you not know that you know your own mother you weren't you there yeah my wife and i were there four to five times a week between the two of us but we didn't make it a habit to strip my mom down we didn't you know most of the time she was in a bed uh blankets sheets up on her you know i didn't pull the sheet you know i sat with my mom i held her hand um but yeah i didn't take the sheets down and i didn't pull down her her nightgown um and and i didn't inspect i never even thought i never even you know again we were paying money to number one make sure that wasn't happening and if it was that we would know about it that we would have been told that we could have done some things um that we could have gotten the proper medical care in there and it was shown later that this was all covered up that the the people that did know were being told not to say anything on valentine's day 2009 joan boyce died [Music] the boy's family decided to sue emeritus and hired elder abuse attorney leslie clement this isn't just about joan boyce this is about everyone who has alzheimer's or dementia this is about every senior who has any type of physical disability and is dependent on staff for help joan boyce was not unique joan boyce is is typical of the resident population in assisted living today this is the population that they're marketing for this is the population they're going after this is the population that's going to make them a lot of money clement subpoenaed thousands of pages of documents from emeritus headquarters in seattle she says one of those documents proves that emeritus ordered facilities to target seriously ill seniors such as those with advanced dementia because they could be charged more everything i look at at the corporate level all of their records it's all about a push for more money to increase the cash flow and there's no talk about caring for the elderly i mean when you read their records you think that this is a real estate company clement uncovered evidence that at the same time it was targeting seriously ill seniors emeritus was failing to hire or train enough staff to care for them the law in california says you have to have enough staff to meet the needs of your residents each resident in your building and it has to be enough in number and competency and there's training that's required and when i looked into subpoenaed all of the personnel files for the caregivers i found over and over and over again they did not have the state required mandated training they didn't have the emeritus required training not only did the caregivers not have it the directors didn't have it is it any surprise to you that with the staffing that emeritus had in this building that mrs voice ended up falling clement took what she'd uncovered and used it to confront numerous current and former emeritus executives under catherine oath was a vice president of operations at emeritus when you were the vpo at emeritus did you have an understanding as to what educational background you expected of your memory care unit directors i don't recall what the expectation is how about experience do you have an expectation as the vpo as to what the experience level would be of the memory care director i don't recall what it was alicia pargo the memory care director at emerald hills was on the job for 18 months without the legally required dementia training did you feel often times that you just did not have the training that you needed to do that job as a memory care unit director lex foundation overly broad yes they were constantly being told to cut labor expense cut labor cut labor cut labor especially susan rotella was one of the top three emeritus executives in california she said facility directors felt that they didn't have enough staff to care for their residents so there was a lot of frustration around just these kind of directions from corporate that said cut labor by 10 percent rotella said she asked her bosses why they didn't use a staff-to-resident ratio other companies used them to ensure quality care and who or whom from the senior executive team responded fujimpara our executive vice president of quality he got very agitated and he jumped up and he said we don't use staffing ratios because if we did not have the right amount of staffing in place and a resident issue occurred or incident negative resident issue or incident occurred and we didn't have the right staffing we could be sued rotella said she immediately felt blow back from her question all of a sudden i went from being everyone's you know best friend to um a troubled child because i was bringing up labor standards in this meeting soon after rotella was fired and what reason did they give you for your termination if you recall i was not a fit rotella is suing emeritus for wrongful termination at the same time employees at emerald hills were complaining to their superiors about a shortage of staff they were reporting that dozens of seniors were falling some of the residents were hospitalized for broken bones and other injuries then look at this one third fall within 10 days and look at the time a lot of these things seem to happen when there's not a lot of staff on duty right one person who fell was joan boyce she was there 10 days and she had a fall and she was found face down on the floor she was taken to the hospital alone this woman suffers from dementia they didn't have enough caregiving staff to put someone in the ambulance with her that could be her voice and talk for her at the hospital she comes back that's it she's put in bed she's put in a wheelchair she doesn't move anymore and that's what starts her breakdown she was in the fetal position she wasn't bathed she had eight different areas of skin damage pressure ulcers dead skin that goes through muscle tissue you can see into her body after consulting with a doctor clement concluded the pressure source led to jones death under state law seniors with wounds this serious are not allowed to remain in assisted living but joan stayed at emerald hills for weeks with these sores jenny hitt testified that she tried to treat the wounds herself even though she knew she wasn't qualified to she said her boss told her just don't let anybody know clement also discovered that it was an emeritus policy to keep the back door shut lisa paglia a former regional manager testified about what that meant what did you understand keep that back door closed don't let anybody move out unless they were deceased but emeritus ceo granger cobb testifying under oath disputed that description of the backdoor policy what does that term mean um they it it refers to trying to do everything we can in in situations where residents want to stay with us family want their their loved one to stay with us to be able to to keep them families usually want their loved ones to stay with us as long as possible as opposed to skilled nursing you know very institutional environment and so we try to work with the families and do all we can to to you know accommodate that in the boy's case lawyers for emeritus offered a completely different characterization of the care joan received and why she died the care providers who were providing the care made it pretty clear that they worked very hard to take care of joan boyce we had testimony from witnesses who said they observed outside witnesses they observed the care staff spending hours with mrs boyce you know taking care of her repositioning her keeping her clean so the evidence dictated against mrs boyce being neglected i can understand how a family could be angry about what's happening to their loved one that's real where we go wrong is when we take that anger that that family has and that grief and that suffering and we direct it to the people who were there for the resident they're not the evil it's the diseases of aging that are the evil it was alzheimer's and a series of strokes that led to jones death according to dr richard tindall an expert witness for emeritus the bedsores of the cubit eye did not contribute to her death okay she's having more and more difficulty walking and moving she doesn't want to get up on her leg they interpreted his problem with the foot in reality it's paralysis of the leg this is a stroke syndrome she died because of her alzheimer's and stroke leading to a bedridden status an inability to take adequate nutrition and hydration progressive dehydration malnutrition which then you stop breathing and you die and that is in fact in a hospice situation how alzheimer's patients and severe stroke patients die to counter the emeritus case clement tapped one of the country's leading forensic geriatricians the key record in this particular case is the description of the pressure ulcers that she acquired at emeritus we have photographic evidence and we have measurements taken at the nursing home where she went we have a very complete description of what her condition was like when she left emeritus we also have some records from before she went to emeritus if you just if you didn't know anything about emeritus or the facility uh and you would look at her the condition when she went in and the condition when she left you would say wow what happened to her something you know really bad must have happened to her then you look at the operation of the facility and you say she was neglected that's how she ended up like that and you think that neglect stems from there being not enough trained staff exactly not enough staff so no one can help or walk to keep her walking and if you don't help her move she's going to get a pressure injury to her skin so those things all should have been done instead nothing was done deep into the litigation emeritus offered to settle the case so the company came to us and offered us 3.3 million dollars to um walk away to turn her back and not say any more about this case they offered you three million dollars over three yeah and um so and that that assists a substantial amount of money but that also came with basically a gag order a an order that we wouldn't have been able to talk we would not have been able to share my mom's story they wanted us to turn over all of our investigative everything and they knew that we had a lot of stuff that had been uncovered and they wanted all that they wanted it all to be shredded all to be destroyed um that was part of the bargain for the money and um we weren't willing to do that emeritus says it never told the family it would shred the documents and that any offer it made was not an admission of wrongdoing and so the trial went on and on march 5th 2013 all 12 jurors found the emeritus corporation liable for recklessness oppression and fraud in the wrongful death of joan boyce and they ruled that emeritus executives were well aware of the unfitness of their employees the jury awarded punitive damages of nearly 23 million dollars the amount came from combining granger cobb's annual compensation with that of the company's chairman and the 81 cents that was to remind emeritus of jones age it's a huge number it's a devastating number but i think it's just a function of the size of my client i think they're in some ways a victim of their success and growth and it's unfortunate that because they're large that the verdict therefore is large you know somebody last weekend i was with some friends and they said isn't that an aren't you just ecstatic aren't you just so over joyed with with this verdict and it was a i don't think he thought it was as deep but for me i had to sit back i had to stand back from that question i had to look and i go and my honest answer was i'm not as overjoyed as i thought i would be and he was like and and the guys that i was with were like what technically yeah we won and emeritus lost but to me it's bigger than that it's more about right and wrong and i don't feel that with this loss emeritus is doing anything different i honestly don't think they've changed their their practice their business as usual we asked emeritus executives to comment on camera but they declined instead they responded in writing we were extremely disappointed that this jury found our care of mrs boyce unsatisfactory and we adamantly disagree with the outcome of this trial our dedicated and hardworking caregivers provided her with quality care during the three months she lived with us the company also wrote that its violations have trended down significantly over the last five years and emeritus said it is appealing the jury award but in response to its initial motion the judge ruled the boy's family had proven their case and denied the company's request to reduce the award i would say that today one of the few remedies that consumers have with regard to assisted living are lawsuits and that's what we see and that's unfortunate because the industry's always complaining oh there's too many lawsuits and they're frivolous etc i'm shocked that there aren't more tell you the truth when you have a regulatory system that's not doing its job when you have people who are filing complaints and you might as well file those complaints down a black hole that's what's going to happen it's just a horrible system right now the head of a of a state licensing agency told me assisted living is the rock we don't want to look under they know there's a problem but they don't have the resources i mean when it's nursing homes we have federal support for a huge amount of the surveys and inspections and complaint investigations that they do and for the training that the surveyors get none of that exists for inspection and regulation of assisted living none of it we're creating an industry with a million people in it who are becoming more frail who are poorly regulated by the state i mean that's why i talk about it as a ticking time bomb because we're going to see more deaths more injuries and families are going to be so shocked because they think they've made a good decision they think they've made a safe decision [Music] i have dreams i guess they border on nightmares that my mom is with me and she's loosened for a moment um and um you know and and i basically use that time to apologize to her um for not being the uh the voice that she needed for not demanding more of the people that we trusted um with her care but that's a uh that's a fairly common uh dream that i have um so [Music] [Music] for more on this and other frontline programs visit our website at pbs.org frontline front lines life and death in assisted living is available on dvd to order visit shoppbs.org or call 1 800 play pbs frontline is also available for download on itunes so [Music]

Channel: FRONTLINE PBS | Official

Views: 2,514,673

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Id: j5wxhOslUfE

Length: 53min 15sec (3195 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 12 2022