04/28/2020
This is a difficult post to write, but it's something I want to do – especially if it can prevent anyone else from experiencing what our family has gone through for the past eleven months. Long and detailed, but if you want to come along for the ride, buckle up.
First, I want to THANK PROFUSELY the unknown person who recognized this woman from her Crimewatch photo that LPPD posted yesterday (below) and reported her whereabouts.
As most of you know, I lost my mother, Velma Matthew at the end of May last year to an awful incident at her nursing home (in a cruel irony, on the evening of the day Richard Wilhelm paid a beautiful tribute to her in his remarks at the Penn-Bernville alumni luncheon, a tribute that he repeated at Mom‘s memorial service). The CNA caring for her rolled her off of her bed at height, and because she was completely incapacitated, she had no way to break her fall, and she landed on the concrete floor on her face, shattering her bones and losing several teeth. She died four days later in Hershey Medical Center.
There's been a continuing investigation into her death since early June, thanks to an evidence officer and a detective from the Lower Paxton Township Police who opened the case on his own initiative. That investigation almost immediately transferred to the PA Attorney General's Dependent Care Abuse and Neglect unit, because that unit specializes in investigating nursing home incidents (they brought in the LPPD detective to assist).
The investigators have been working tirelessly for ten months, and Monday they presented a complaint to a Magisterial District Judge, who issued an arrest warrant. The charges in my mother's case were one felony (neglect of care-dependent person – reckless endangerment resulting in death), one first-degree misdemeanor (involuntary manslaughter), and a second-degree misdemeanor (neglect of care-dependent person – reckless endangerment). There was an additional warrant for injuries to another resident of the same nursing home only a week after my mother's incident (that resident survived with a broken leg).
This afternoon, the AG's forensic nurse on the team called to tell me that, as a result of an anonymous tip from someone who saw the LPPD's Crimewatch post yesterday, they found the CNA and arrested her today (she had been dodging the authorities for a week). She was working at a subacute care facility in Mechanicsburg - !!
She's been arraigned, and she's currently residing in Dauphin County Prison in lieu of $60K bail ($50K for my mother's case, $10K for the other matter). She could have avoided prison by turning herself in, but she chose not to do that.
This is by no means over, and with the current Covid situation it could be June before there's even a preliminary hearing. But she's in custody and, at least for now, she can't hurt anyone else – hopefully ever again.
This almost didn't go anywhere. I had contacted LPPD the day after the incident to ask them to investigate, but the officer who went to the nursing home reported there was nothing amiss, despite information I gave him about some questionable/inconsistent things the RN nursing home contact had said to me about what happened.
The ONLY reason this went anywhere was that the evidence officer at LPPD happened to be reading the coroner's report a week after Mom died when the detective who started the investigation walked in and saw the evidence officer had a puzzled look on his face. The detective asked what was up. The evidence officer said something like, “Something here just doesn't add up” - and from there, the detective took it upon himself to dig into the events that led to Mom's death.
So this is all a long-winded way of saying: if you have a loved one in care, and there's an incident that seems “off” - don't let it go! Rattle some chains. Speak up. Keep after it. Had these two men at LPPD not started the investigation, this woman likely would STILL be working with dependent adults. I'm beyond grateful that she's out of that now.
