- All of the families initially chose Arden Courts because it advertised its expertise in dementia care. But many also spoke of how they later felt trapped in their decision.
- In August 2022, the Division of Health Care Quality penalized Arden Courts with a three-month provisional license because it was not meeting state standards.
- However, it’s difficult for families seeking care for their loved ones to know about these lack of inspections and regulations governing facilities offering dementia care.
They regularly found their loved ones at Arden Courts soaked in their own urine. One fall, then another and another. Bloody bandages not properly changed.
One family member received anonymous, threatening text messages.
“Arden Courts is soo sick of your (expletive),” one of the texts reads, which was reviewed by The News Journal. “Find that (expletive) a new place of residence.”
Three families described to Delaware Online/The News Journal the poor care they say their mother, wife and best friend, respectively, received at Arden Courts. They make up the six families who spoke to The News Journal about abuse and neglect they believe their loved ones faced while residing at the assisted living facility.
All of the families initially chose Arden Courts because it advertised its expertise in dementia care. But many also spoke of how they later felt trapped in their decision. Despite seeing poor care, many felt they had nowhere else to go.
It’s not just Arden Courts. Interviews with other Delaware families and analysis of inspection records show the significant care and neglect some assisted living residents have faced in the past decade.
One facility, State Street, was repeatedly cited over the years for residents leaving the facility without supervision. From 2013 to 2014, five residents with dementia went temporarily missing without the staff’s knowledge, according to a state inspection report. In 2018, the facility was also cited for insufficient staffing and failing to prevent residents from being sexually abused.
INVESTIGATIVE REPORTING:They trusted this assisted living to protect their mother. Then came the call on Christmas
The state has imposed a total of $98,000 in fines on State Street, the most of any assisted living facility in the past decade, according to data The News Journal obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request.
In August 2022, the Division of Health Care Quality penalized Arden Courts with a three-month provisional license because it was not meeting state standards. An Arden Courts spokeswoman said the organization believes this was issued to “provide more time to supply additional information requested as part of the routine license renewal process.”
“To our knowledge, the provisional license was not related to any specific patient care concern,” the spokeswoman said.
The state would not comment on what regulations Arden Courts failed to meet. A health department spokesman said a provisional license is used as a remedy when a long-term care facility is in “substantial but not full compliance with applicable laws and regulations.”
The News Journal sent detailed questions to Arden Courts regarding the claims made by family members. The facility declined to answer, citing residents’ privacy concerns. In a statement, the facility said it “strives to create a safe and secure environment for all our residents and is committed to ensuring their emotional and physical well-being.”
“We focus on working closely with residents and families to address any concerns in a timely manner,” the statement also reads.
All of the families interviewed said they believe the care at Arden Courts contributed to their loved ones’ decline or death.
“Your expectations are that your loved one is going to be comfortable, they’re going to be safe. You’re going to maintain their dignity,” said Ken Creasey, whose wife lived at Arden Courts.
“And that just wasn’t happening.”
‘Please don’t make me go back there’
Maggie Goonan did not want to send her mother back to Arden Courts. But she felt she had no choice.
In the course of five years, her mother Alecia LaScala lived in three assisted living facilities. Arden Courts seemed to be the one place that could handle Alecia’s disruptive behaviors, a symptom of her dementia.
Arden Courts never called Goonan in the middle of the night like the other places did, asking her to come to the facility to handle her mother. But when she took her mother out to dinner, Alecia would plead with her daughter: “Please don’t make me go back there.”
Goonan moved Alecia to Somerford Place, an assisted living facility closer to where she lived. Four months later, Alecia fell and broke her back.
“I had to go crawling back to Arden Courts with my tail between my legs, begging them to take her back,” Goonan said. “She had issues pretty quickly when she got back there.”
Goonan said she felt grossed out each time she stepped into Arden Courts. She once hired a cleaning service to scrub her mother’s room. She said she found food in her mother’s sheets, on her clothes and in her hair. Her mom was regularly soaked in urine.
It wasn’t unusual, Goonan said, for her to find her mother wearing a man’s pair of pants and no underwear.
“They looked like they crawled out of a dumpster,” she said of the residents’ appearances.
Goonan said she never felt a “sense of urgency” from Arden Courts when she asked the staff to address her mother’s complaints of being in pain. It sometimes took days or weeks, she said, to get an X-ray or receive necessary medication.
In one instance, on Dec. 30, 2018, Alecia fell out of her wheelchair. Arden Courts told Goonan that they assessed her mother and she appeared to be fine. But when Goonan took her mom out of Arden Courts for a New Year’s Eve party, she kept crying that she had pain in her abdomen.
Goonan said she asked for an X-ray to be done, which she said took days to do. She heard her mother scream while she was going through the testing. Goonan recalled being told on Jan. 4 that the X-rays did not show any signs of injuries, even though her mother was still saying she was in pain.
Almost one week later, Goonan visited Arden Courts. She found her mother in the dining room, with her head down on the table.
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“I’m in so much pain,” she recalled her mother telling her, as tears streamed down her face. Goonan then fired off an email to Arden Courts, asking for her mother to be taken to ChristianaCare the next day.
That morning, Goonan received a call that her mother was found out of her bed, screaming. She was taken to the emergency room, where Goonan said they discovered Alecia had a fractured L2 and T12 veritable, which controls muscles in the abdomen.
In April 2020, Alecia was hospitalized for severe dehydration. Goonan had been concerned about her mother’s drinking and eating since the private aides she paid for were not allowed into the facility at that time due to the onset of COVID-19.
She said she dropped off a case of Gatorade for her mother to drink on April 6, according to her personal notes, asking the staff to help encourage her mother to drink it. Goonan said a camera she set up in her mother’s room showed it remained unopened days later.
On April 16, Alecia was hospitalized for severe dehydration. Doctors told Goonan that her mother had kidney damage due to dehydration.
In September, Alecia was hospitalized for dehydration again. Days later, Arden Courts served Goonan discharge papers, with the facility citing that it could no longer meet Alecia’s needs.
Through a state ombudsman, Goonan filed a motion to dismiss, arguing Arden Courts did not provide the required documentation showing that it could not take care of Alecia, according to the documents obtained by The News Journal. Facilities also are not allowed to discharge a person in hospice.
During a November 2021 hearing, Arden Courts officials said Alecia would be allowed to stay at the facility if she remained on hospice and hospice provided services for her.
That July, Goonan decided to take her mom out of Arden Courts. Alecia was bedbound by that time, Goonan said, since the facility declined to transfer her to a recliner.
A cousin of Goonan’s, who worked in home health care, offered to care for Alecia in her Delaware City home. Alecia was transported there on a stretcher in the fetal position, Goonan recalled. She was barely responsive and nonverbal.
Goonan estimated that within about 36 hours, her mother was sitting up, laughing and smiling.
“That’s what a little bit of care does,” she said. Alecia died in March at the age of 79.
‘She was in bed till the day she died’
Across the hall from Alecia lived Gerry Creasey. Goonan became close friends with Gerry’s husband, Ken Creasey.
Creasey said he began to realize how Arden Courts was not equipped to care for his wife Gerry, as her dementia continued to progress. Around 2019, Gerry broke her hip after an “unwitnessed fall,” Creasey said. She had surgery and went through rehabilitation.
“After her first fall, I asked: ‘What’s your fall prevention program?’ The answer that I got was, ‘Well, with the disease they fall a lot,’” Creasey said.
This response shocked Creasey, who previously worked at the Delaware Psychiatric Center as a risk manager and safety officer. He spent years investigating care issues at the state-run facility and prided himself on being well-versed in Delaware code.
He then realized assisted living facilities, even those with dementia care units, have a different set of regulations. He learned caregivers did not need to be certified nursing assistants and that registered nurses are not required to be staffed at night.
The unexplained injuries continued. A black eye. More falls. All incidents Creasey thought could have been prevented.
Then, Gerry fell and broke her hip again. The family, this time, decided to not put Gerry through a second surgery. They weren’t sure she would be able to recover from the strenuous rehabilitation.
Creasey said the facility told him that Gerry would be more comfortable in bed all day. He was also told she was too heavy to lift, meaning that she spent her days isolated from others.
The staff, Creasey said, also wasn’t rotating her every two hours like they said they would.
“Once Gerry went into the room, she started to go downhill,” Creasey said. “She was in bed ’til the day she died.”
Gerry died in 2022 at the age of 74. At the funeral, Goonan, along with Gerry’s daughter Susan, held Ken’s hands as they followed Gerry’s casket into the chapel.
‘I wasn’t worried for myself, but I was very worried for her’
The text messages began in December 2022.
They came shortly after the mysterious phone calls were made to Jane Lee’s home. No one ever said anything on the other line. Just before 5 p.m. on December 15, Lee received nine text messages that just said “Betty Lou.”
The final one that night read: “B—-.”
Lee had served as her best friend Betty Lou Carrow’s power of attorney. The two had lived together for 40 years before Carrow’s dementia progressed in 2018. Lee recalls how Carrow was confused about what Lee was doing in their home and began barricading herself in her room. She moved into Arden Courts shortly after.
Like Goonan and Creasey, Lee noticed a change in the quality of care after the beginning of the pandemic. She regularly found Carrow soaked in her own urine. Carrow also fell often. Lee worried about her friend’s eating and drinking. By 2022, Carrow was frail and declining. She entered hospice around that time.
A week before the messages came in, Lee wrote to Arden Courts about how she was frustrated that Carrow’s bed was broken. Carrow changed rooms because the wing she lived in had closed.
Lee emailed Arden Courts leadership less than two hours after receiving the text messages. She felt there was a connection to the facility since it was the only place that had Lee’s phone number regarding Carrow.
She asked in her email, reviewed by The News Journal, for the facility to see if the phone number is associated with an employee.
“I am not asking you to tell me who,” Lee wrote. “I AM asking that you confront this employee and ensure that Betty Lou comes to no harm. If she is not kept safe, I will know where the responsibility lies.”
Lee said she received no response from Arden Courts. When she texted the mysterious number the next day about how these messages were reported to the police, the number replied: “Shut up b—- she’s going to die anyway.”
“I wasn’t worried for myself, but I was very worried for her,” Lee said in an interview. “She was so vulnerable and she couldn’t even tell me if somebody was hurting her.”
Arden Courts declined to answer questions regarding these text messages, specifically if leadership responded to Lee’s emails and if an internal investigation was ever conducted.
On Feb. 3, 2023, Lee received a final text message from the same number – this time, it mentioned Arden Courts. Lee said she again informed the facility. She said the executive director told her she warned her staff against this behavior, despite previous refusals to do so.
A health department spokesman said the DHCQ investigative unit conducted an investigation into the text messages. It was then “referred to law enforcement.” Lee filed a police report with the New Castle County Police.
But no charges ended up being filed. The phone number appeared to be fake, police said. Ultimately, there was no information about the suspect.
Later in February, Lee noticed that Carrow had injured her right shin. There was a skin tear that required two bandages to cover it. The bandages continued to be bloody for three weeks, she said.
It took about two weeks, Lee said, for an Arden Courts doctor to prescribe an antibiotic. When Lee applied lotion to Carrow’s legs, which she said she did every day, she noticed two weeks later that her friend’s left leg was fiery red and tender. Carrow was in pain.
Carrow refused food and drink on March 31 and by the next day, she was unconscious, Lee said. Lee said it took the facility eight hours to get a prescription for liquid morphine.
Carrow died April 4 at the age of 90.
Does your family have an experience with a Delaware assisted living facility? Fill out this form. To contact reporter, Meredith Newman, email her at mnewman@delawareonline.com or call her at 302-256-2466.
