Search warrant issued in nursing home deaths
They came in one after the other. Three patients with “extraordinarily high” body temperatures were rushed early Wednesday morning into the emergency room at Memorial Regional Hospital in Hollywood. And they came from the nursing home across the street.
“It set off a red flag,” Judy Frum, the hospital’s chief nursing officer, said Thursday. “We walked over to see if we could offer assistance.”
What Frum and others from Memorial found at The Rehabilitation Center at Hollywood Hills sent them into crisis mode.
The nursing home was chaotic: Sweltering heat filled the building, where the air conditioning had been knocked out since Sunday.
Fire-rescue workers went roomto-room to check the conditions of the frail seniors. Panicked nursing home workers tried to move people to areas where fans were blowing to cool them down. Hospital workers sprinted up the nursing home’s stairs to try to save residents.
The seniors looked dehydrated and in distress. They were warm to the touch. “I thought it was an extreme situation, and we had to get people out,” Frum said.
Hospital staff ferried stretchers and wheelchairs across the street to bring patients to cool sanctuary at the hospital. They were the lucky ones. Eight of the residents didn’t make it to safety. The victims, between the ages of 70 and 99, were pronounced dead. Some were found in their rooms.
Hollywood paramedics arrived about 6:47 a.m., according to radio transmissions archived by the audio streaming website Broadcastify.
They conducted triage, evaluating patients based on the severity of their needs, on the first floor of the nursing home. Patients were labeled red, yellow or green so they could get the most critically ill patients transferred first.
Rescue workers started calling for help from other agencies.
Within 10 minutes, three people were reported dead. Within 20, that number rose to five. About an hour after paramedics arrived, the most critically ill patients were taken from the home, according to the transmissions.
Hollywood police have begun a criminal investigation and were interviewing witnesses on Thursday who had been in the home at 1200 N. 35th Ave.
Authorities obtained a search warrant and were expected to begin combing the building for evidence either late Thursday or early today, said Raelin Storey, a spokeswoman for the city of Hollywood.
At this stage of the investigation, officials said they were still working on coming up with an accurate timeline of how the crisis unfolded.
Dr. Craig Mallak, Broward’s medical examiner, provided a list of the victims and the time and location where they were pronounced dead — all on Wednesday:
Mallak said he could not release any further details because of Hollywood’s ongoing investigation.
The first death apparently set off no alarms, at least outside the nursing home. Officials were not notified of the death, city spokeswoman Storey said.
After police learned of the other deaths and began their investigation, the Broward Medical Examiner’s Office picked up the first victim’s remains from the funeral home to conduct an autopsy.
Sen. Bill Nelson wrote to federal officials on Thursday urging them to “hold those responsible for the deaths … accountable and ensure that sufficient safeguards are in place to prevent a similar tragedy from happening in the future.”
“I am even more troubled that there was a functioning hospital across the street from the nursing home, and yet these residents remained trapped in extreme temperatures for multiple days,” Nelson wrote. “Failure to transfer them to a hospital some 50 yards away is unforgivable.”