One patient at Alzheimer’s Care of Commerce fell into a coma and later died after employees who were not medically trained repeatedly restrained him and gave him morphine, several former employees told GBI investigators.
His is one of three residents’ deaths in recent months under review by the GBI.
Another patient was found wandering and disoriented at a neighborhood drugstore; employees of the Alzheimer’s center were not aware that she was missing for three hours.
Those and other allegations, are detailed in a search warrant application obtained exclusively Friday by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. They paint a picture of unqualified staff members striking belligerent patients or drugging them into unconsciousness to keep them docile.
On July 2, dozens of GBI agents and other police officers raided the Commerce facility, closing it down and serving arrest warrants for the owner, Donna Wright, and 20 employees. Charges against them include cruelty to a person 65 years of age or older, abuse, neglect and financial exploitation and failure to report mistreatment.
Wright’s attorney, Mo Wiltshire, said Friday that he sees nothing in the search warrant application to implicate Wright personally in any criminal wrongdoing.
“I see a giant net – all the way from murder to tax evasion,” Wiltshire said, referring to a list of potential crimes listed in the application.
Friday, a GBI spokesman said the application listed a wide array of possible offenses in the interest of thoroughness. “We needed to secure any evidence that would help support the findings of the GBI medical examiner,” said agency spokesman. John Heinen. “He is reviewing the deaths due to the nature of this entire case in an effort to be thorough.”
As to the allegations of employees over medicating patients, Wiltshire said this is something Wright would not have participated in or tolerated.
“She was the owner, and, if to the extent some of this stuff is true, and we’ll see, they (employees) snuck it past her,” he said. “If she’d known about it, they would have been fired. She would not have tolerated it.”
Several relatives of patients at the center told the AJC they saw no signs of abuse or neglect.
The case cited as most troubling by several former employees involved a man who entered the facility “walking and talking.” A week later, according to four former employees, “he was in a comatose state and no longer could walk, talk or do anything for himself,” according to the document obtained by the AJC.
One former employee told the GBI that managers at the center discouraged the man’s wife from requesting an autopsy. On the death certificate, his death is attributed to a stroke, according to the documents.
Strokes also were blamed for the deaths of the two other residents whose medical files are under review.
The search warrant application was filed June 26 with Jackson County Superior Court by J. Michael Marlar, a special agent with the GBI. In the eight-page affidavit, he provided a detailed account of the allegations that led to the raid.
According to his sworn statement, the first former employee interviewed by the GBI told investigators that “meds are given out to keep the residents asleep so they don’t ‘have to deal with them.’”
In addition, she reported, “there are not any registered nurses or medical personnel at the facility, but they have ‘managers’ who give out the medications.”
And she described incidents in which employees struck agitated residents in order to subdue them.
In subsequent interviews, other former staff members repeated many of the same charges. One said staff gave residents cookies laced with morphine.
According to the affidavit, an independent inquiry by the state Office of Regulatory Standards also suggested that morphine prescribed for residents was missing or unaccounted for.
People interviewed by investigators told the GBI that Wright and the center’s manager were advising them not to answer law enforcement officials’ questions.
Wright herself contacted the GBI to say that the former employee who provided the first statement bore a grudge because her husband, who also worked at the facility, had been fired.
Wiltshire repeated that view Friday. Marlar’s affidavit “shows what we said we’ve suspected: All this was started by a disgruntled former employee,” he said.
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