California Nursing Home Abandons Residents
BANFIELD: Welcome back. It's a necessary and sometimes dreaded task that more and more people are facing, placing an aging parent in an assisted living facility, not an easy decision. But once it's done, at the very least you expect that your loved one is going to receive the best of care, right? Not the case, at least in one assisted living facility in California. Not only were the residents allegedly not being cared for, they were outright abandoned. Stephanie Elam now with details of this astounding story.</s>STAPHANIE ELAM, CNN CORRESPONDENT: It was nothing less than chaos. Medics racing to rescue more than a dozen elderly residents after they were abandoned by the majority of the caregivers at Valley Springs Manor home. J.D. NELSON, ALAMEDE CO. SHERIFF'S DEPT." How do you do that? We're talking about human beings. How do you just abandon them? It's a bad situation.</s>ELAM: It's exactly what the state of California said was happening for years, according to this complaint from the Department of Social Services which was in the process of shutting the place down. Last Thursday the state suspended Valley Spring's license citing a long list of violations including insufficient employee training, failure to provide necessary medication to patients, not properly treating or reporting patient injuries, and poor maintenance and cleanliness. Once the government stepped in, the owners were not allowed near the facility. End of story, right? Wrong. Some patients were still there. By the close of business on Friday, anyone with any authority was gone, nowhere to be found. The residents were left in the hands of two caregivers and a cook who says they didn't have the proper training to do all that they were doing for the residents, but they felt compelled to stay. This man, Maurice Roland (ph) a cook, says he and the others took other and trained took over, trying to do anything they could to look after the residents who needed round the clock care. Did you feel overwhelmed with all you had to do for these residents?</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I was already overwhelmed by day two.</s>ELAM: Overwhelmed because they needed to help with everything from using the bathroom, to preparing their meals, and even taking medication, which no one was authorized to provide.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I definitely wasn't the one that was supposed to be giving them their meds.</s>ELAM: Why did you stay?</s>MAURICE ROLAND, COOK: In my eyes I had to stay. I couldn't leave the residents. If so, no telling what would have happened.</s>ELAM: Roland says so many needed urgent care that he kept calling 911 for different patients.</s>NELSON: We kept finding people there with nobody there to care for. Paramedics and ambulance company got them all transported to the hospitals.</s>ELAM: What's more, the families of the people abandoned at the home didn't even know it had been shut down. Jean Pong (ph) paid the facility $3,000 a month to care for her sister, but she arrived to find she wasn't cares for at all.</s>JEAN PONG, SISTER: They should be held accountable. You can't just vacate and leave your residents without proper care. This is what we pay for.</s>ELAM: There were no answers at the facility when we came looking for the owner, Hilda Manuel. We also looked for her at her home. Nobody answered. So why did the Department of Social Services which wanted to close the facility just leave without making sure the patients were taken care of?</s>MICHAEL WESTON, DEPUTY DIRECTOR, PUBLIC AFFAIRS: Staff at the facility said they could provide care of the residents through the weekend. That should not have occurred.</s>ELAM: They say there's no doubt they dropped the ball. The owners failed these residents. I think there's no one who's going to doubt that part. Do you believe that the state also failed these residents?</s>WESTON: Again, like I said, we had procedures that should have been followed and they weren't and we're going to figure out why that happened, and we're going to ensure it doesn't happen again.</s>ELAM: I spoke to lawyer for the owner of this property and he says that authorities jumped the gun by removing all of the residents out of the property. He said they were working to fix some of the violations that had come up with the government. He also said the owner was not abandoning these people here but was working to find new homes for them in an orderly fashion. Stephanie Elam, CNN, Castro Valley California.</s>BANFIELD: All right, Stephanie Elam, thank you for that. Imagine being in labor for six hours without any doctors or midwives anywhere around and it just so happens your home is surrounded by that. Raging floodwaters. Coming up, how did the rescue teams get to that woman behind the wall of water in Texas? Also, these two people are accused of some very disturbing child abuse. They allegedly put a shock collar used for dogs on their child. Find out why and what happened to them straight ahead.