Many of our seniors living in facilities throughout the country are at risk because they are living among registered sex offenders, parolees and residents with violent histories, according to a nursing home watchdog who studied residents at nursing homes, assisted living homes and long term care facilities. Wes Bledsoe, who is set to testify at a Congressional hearing on predators in these facilities reports, “What is shocking is we have found 1,600 registered sex offenders across the country [in facilities with seniors].” Bledsoe has tracked the number of offenders living in these facilities over the past four years. Bledsoe goes on to say, “In many of these cases the offenders are young adults who are often placed in the facilities because of disabilities or behavioral problems. We found teenagers… many in their twenties, thirties, and forties.” Bledsoe also documented over sixty rapes, murders, and assaults committed by criminal offenders in these homes. “There is no law, federal or state, that keeps violent or sexual offenders out of long-term care facilities as residents,” he said.
The Congressional hearing that Bledsoe is set to testify at will also include the testimony of Sandra Banning. Banning said she had no choice but to place her mother, Virginia Thurston, in a nursing home due to dementia and her repeated wandering of the streets alone in the middle of the night. Banning, 60, said she had no idea that the facility she placed her mother in was also the home of a violent offender with a history of arrests. She found out after nursing home staff called her July 23, 2002 to tell her the offender had raped Thurston, then 77, in her bed. After the incident, Banning discovered that the assailant had been arrested 58 times and that a court had ordered him to move from a homeless shelter into the assisted-living facility.
Although Banning won a civil suit against the nursing home last year for the amount of $750,000, she still holds an incomparable amount of guilt for unknowingly putting her mother and “best friend” in harms way. Once she retires, Sandra plans to devote her life to fighting this serious problem of criminals and sex offenders being mixed in with innocent helpless residents.
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