Families say Arizona regulators failed them
‘OF GOOD CHARACTER’ A state licensing board allowed a felon to run a Prescott nursing home Staffers with COVID-19 were made to work, some sweating and weak More than 50 residents came down with the disease and at least 15 died ‘GOOD LUCK TO YOU’
Larry Michael Rasmussen had two felony convictions for fraud when he applied to become the nursing home administrator for Granite Creek Health and Rehabilitation Center in Prescott.
Records show he had worked for the facility for less than a year — his only experience in anything related to health care.
He explained to the licensing board that he paid back all of the people he was convicted of cheating during business deals that went sour in Utah in the mid-2000s. He said working with elderly residents was rewarding, enjoyable work.
“It’s a vulnerable population who needs advocates, who needs people to speak for them, to take
“The board really screwed up. Why have a board if they’re not there to protect?”
Kathy Smith
Who lost her husband, Donnie, after a brief stay at Granite Creek
care for them,” Rasmussen said. “It’s been interesting in my time how the staff at the facility becomes their family. … It’s by far the funnest job I’ve ever had in my life.”
After only about six minutes of discussion, all but one member of the governor-appointed board approved Rasmussen’s license.
“Good luck to you,” said then-board President Charles Seal-Villafranca.
Four months later, state investigators found Rasmussen and members of his management team forced employees who had tested positive with COVID-19 — some of whom were “sweating and weak,” running high fevers and having trouble breathing — to show up for work at Granite Creek.
The facility was short-staffed, but a nursing home inspection report shows Rasmussen wouldn’t hire extras because hazard-pay rates increased their cost by $5 to $10 per hour.
More than 50 residents came down with the disease and at least 15 died within the next month.
Rasmussen was replaced shortly thereafter. The facility has been fined $500 by the Arizona Department of Health Services and was hit with a $25,720 penalty by Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
But nothing has been done to punish Arizona’s Board of Examiners of Nursing Care Institution Administrators and Assisted Living Facility Managers.
The nine-member board is responsible for protecting the tens of thousands of senior citizens living in the state’s more than 2,200 nursing homes and assisted living facilities. Members are tasked with licensing nursing home administrators “of good character,” and with investigating those administrators when they fall short.
In the case of Granite Creek, they failed on both counts.
“The board really screwed up,” said Kathy Smith, who lost her husband, Donnie, after a brief stay at Granite Creek that summer. “Why have a board if they’re not there to protect?”
The Arizona Republic spent more than a month reviewing arrest reports and lawsuits that delved into Rasmussen’s criminal background as well as filings from the Department of Health Services that described what transpired at Granite Creek.
Among the findings:
● In a letter to and a conversation with the licensing board, Rasmussen blamed his crimes on an unindicted coconspirator, saying this person was the one who took investor money and disappeared, and that Rasmussen worked to repay everyone involved. Arrest reports, however, provide more details about what actually happened. It is not clear whether licensing board staff or board members compared Rasmussen’s version of the events to what was written in those reports.
● After moving to Arizona and going by his middle name, “Mike,” Rasmussen worked for Grand Canyon University for a decade before taking a job as vice president of enrollment operations with Dream Center Education Holdings LLC in April 2018. Less than a year later, Dream Center collapsed amid news reports that it failed to pay more than $13 million in student aid stipends to tens of thousands of students who had enrolled at Argosy University and other colleges that Dream Center owned.
● Members of the nursing home licensing board asked Rasmussen for few details about his felony record during a brief meeting in February 2020 to approve his Granite Creek administrator license. Members also did not ask him about his role at Dream Center Education Holdings, nor did they question his lack of experience running nursing home facilities.
The consequences of the board’s approval of Rasmussen to manage Granite Creek will never be forgotten by people who lost their spouses or parents, or who were separated from them indefinitely in the wake of COVID-19’s crippling effects.
Rasmussen did not respond to an email and two voicemails left on the number on file with the nursing home administration board.
A representative for the public company that owns Granite Creek — Ensign Services — declined to comment, referring questions back to the nursing home.
Kyle Karren, who was Granite Creek’s administrator when the board launched an investigation in February, told The Republic that the facility “fully responded” to the state’s findings and returned to compliance.
“The Facility continues in the implementation of its robust infection prevention and control program, and remains committed to the health and safety of those whom we have the privilege to care for and those who deliver care to them,” Karren said in an email in February.
Granite Creek has a new administrator now.
Not one of the board members who voted on Rasmussen’s license and whether to investigate his tenure was willing to talk about their decisions.
The board’s current director, Sabrina Kahn, who took over in March, said she was not able to comment on confidential matters, but would answer general questions about the board and its responsibilities via email.
Board members are busy people. They meet at least once a month and most run their own nursing homes or assisted living facilities. But the board does have a staff of four. Their tasks include doing background research on candidates before the board licenses them and investigating problems that arise after they charge.
So there’s no excuse for what happened at Granite Creek, according to state Rep. Diego Rodriguez, D-Phoenix. He wants to investigate the board’s licensing and investigation process.
“This is so incredibly lazy,” Rodriguez said. “Whenever you see the word fraud, that automatically tells you the person’s character comes into question.
“Clearly the board does not seem to operate under the notion that its first mission is to protect the health and welfare of the public who are going to be exposed to this person,” he added. “They don’t even operate with common sense.”
In fact, the board was already being audited while members were approving Rasmussen’s license.
Two weeks later, the Arizona Auditor General’s Office published a report concluding members failed to meet all of the fingerprinting and other backgrounding criteria needed to license 12 of 32 randomly selected candidates who had applied to manage senior living facilities. The report recommended that board members make sure future applicants meet statutory requirements to legally work in Arizona and possess valid fingerprint clearance cards; that they investigate and adjudicate complaints in a timely manner; and they provide accurate information to the public.
The auditor general will follow up again this August.
Smith, who pulled her husband from Granite Creek, said she could never get a straight answer from Rasmussen about what was happening inside the facility while Donnie languished inside.
“I could not joke with people when my husband was in a place like that, and that’s what Rasmussen wanted to do,” she said. “He wanted to play things down.”
Donnie died a few days after she brought him home. Kathy was alone. She didn’t want her family to risk getting sick by coming to comfort her.
‘Every Individual Should Acquire Investments’
During the real estate boom of the mid-2000s, Rasmussen was bent on making money. But even before the market crashed, he was deep in debt.
Court records show Rasmussen owed more than $530,000 on a house in the suburbs of Salt Lake City that was only valued at $440,000. He also owed $14,000 in child support and $4,000 to his ex-wife.
To generate income, Rasmussen approached Clyde Rhodes in June 2004. He said he could help the Utah developer finish a subdivision with a $4 million loan if Rhodes could come up with part of the down payment — $130,000, according to the criminal complaint filed by an investigator in the case.
Rhodes fulfilled his end of the bargain, but the loan never materialized. When Rhodes asked for his money back a few weeks later, Rasmussen could only produce $100,000, court records show.
The rest was just gone.
A year later, arrest records show that Rasmussen approached another investor, Darren Taylor, telling him he needed $15,000 to finish a housing development in Syracuse, a picturesque suburb 40 miles north of Salt Lake City. Rasmussen said all the homes were sold and were nearly all built. He’d return $18,000 to Taylor when he was done, the criminal complaint says.
Taylor obliged.
What Rasmussen didn’t mention was that he held no general contractor’s license, which meant he wasn’t legally able to build homes in Utah. He also said nothing about his debts. Nor did he mention he was under investigation by the Utah Division of Real Estate for forgery, arrest records show.
Taylor gave Rasmussen another $1,000 three months later. But when Rasmussen attempted to repay Taylor with a check in February 2006, the check didn’t clear the bank.
That same day, a bank manager put a stop order on all of Rasmussen’s payments after discovering Rasmussen had deposited a stolen check from Walgreens and was beginning to withdraw the proceeds, court records show. The check, written for $1.7 million, was addressed to a large Japanese pharmaceutical company, EISAI, which operates out of a 209,000-square-foot office building developed by Advanced Realty Group in northern New Jersey.
How Rasmussen came across the check is unclear. He told a detective that an overseas business partner named David Anderson, “who lives somewhere in London, England,” had sent it to him. He said he didn’t have Anderson’s contact information, but would get it later. In his report, the detective said that Rasmussen never provided a phone number.
Rasmussen, who had opened a bank account a month earlier under the name of “EIFAI EISAI,” explained that “EISAI” stood for “Every Individual Should Acquire Investments.”
Eight days after Rasmussen deposited the $1.7 million check in his US Bank account, he withdrew $9,950 from two separate branches, the arrest report says. He then asked for two cashier’s checks: one for $30,000 to more than repay Darren Taylor and another $13,000 to pay off his car loan.
By the time Rasmussen attempted to wire $1.5 million to three other bank accounts in his name, US Bank staff was wise to what was going on and alerted law enforcement.
Rasmussen pleaded guilty to one count of securities fraud for making false statements to Taylor and one count of communications fraud for deceiving Rhodes. Rasmussen was was sentenced to 60 days in jail and three years of probation. He also was required to pay $50,000 restitution and to submit to drug testing.
In 2009, a judge gave him permission to move to Arizona.
That’s when Larry became “Mike.”
‘Environment of continuous improvement’
Rasmussen touted his bachelor and master’s degrees from Grand Canyon University as evidence he had turned his life around when he applied for his license to run Granite Creek.
Those degrees were a long time coming.
Between 1986 and 1997, Rasmussen went to four different colleges but never graduated.
At GCU, Rasmussen not only followed through with his education, he also got a steady job from the private Christian university. His job application shows he was employed as director of operations support at GCU for about 10 years. His duties included reporting and tracking budgets.
In October 2017, the former head of GCU, Brent Richardson, was tapped to run Dream Center Education Holdings LLC, which had just bought Argosy University and other chains of colleges with about 60,000 students around the country.
The company promised “to connect broken people to a community of support by offering free resources and services that address immediate and longterm needs in the areas of poverty, addiction, and abuse,” according to the Republic Report, a news site that covers corruption, run by Washington, D.C., attorney David Halperin.
“Our board made the determination that we felt higher education opportunities were a missing component of our efforts to help people transform their lives and become productive citizens,” the company’s managing director said in a statement at the time.
Rasmussen went to work for Dream Center Education Holdings in April 2018, taking a job as vice president of enrollment operations in the Chandler office.
Not long after his arrival, Dream Center imploded.
Rather than achieving its high ideals, Dream Center ended up stiffing students out of millions of federal loan dollars by March 2019, leading many to miss mortgage payments, to stop buying books required for classes and to skip grocery runs.
The nationwide chains of schools shuttered after the U.S. Department of Education barred them from eligibility for federal aid programs.
The debacle was widely covered by local and national media outlets.
The Republic found no indication that Rasmussen was engaged in wrongdoing at Dream Center. In his application to become a nursing home administrator, he said he was responsible “for the processes and operations of three education systems” and that he “created an environment of continuous improvement.”
He described his departure from the company as an unexpected termination because the company closed his office.
Nursing home board members never asked about what he did there during the public meeting.
‘An individual of high moral character’
Despite having the power to begin and end the careers of Arizona nursing home administrators, not one of the existing board members was willing to comment about the 5-to-1 vote that put the lives of Granite Greek residents in Rasmussen’s hands, or why they waited months to investigate the illness and death resulting from the decisions made during his tenure.
Board President Pauline “Wally” Campbell — a Goodyear City Council member who sits on a variety of committees, from the National League of Cities to the Friends of the Library — initially told The Republic she wasn’t on the nursing home board administrator when Rasmussen got his license.
When The Republic reminded her that the hearing took place last year, she said she didn’t remember what the board knew about Rasmussen before they approved him and added she didn’t have time to go back and look at the packet.
Instead, she referred the reporter to the board’s executive director.
“I have got to be at City Hall doing a live Facebook feed,” Campbell said, and then hung up.
Like Campbell, other board members referred The Republic to the executive director, often before hearing why the reporter was calling.
Seal-Villafranca, the board’s vice president, said he would have to recuse himself from decisions about Rasmussen’s investigation if he listened to what the reporter was calling about.
“I cannot have a conversation with regards to anything that is pending before the board before it is heard in open session,” he said. “I’m going by the letter of the law.”
He added that even after the case is closed, an interview would have to be approved by the state Attorney General’s Office.
Nowhere in Article 6 of the Arizona statutes or in rules posted on the board’s website does it say board members are prohibited from discussing reasons for approving a convicted felon to run a senior living facility or for postponing investigations into his decisions after taking charge. But Kahn, the board’s director, said in an email that members can choose to exercise caution in discussing board matters outside of a public meeting so as not to impugn their own integrity and impartiality when it comes to making important judgments.
Board members’ terms last two to three years, according to the board’s website, but many current members have been reappointed over and over. The board’s website does not show members’ original appointment dates. At least half were in place prior to the Ducey administration.
Ted Ihrman, a board member who runs the historic Arizona Pioneers Home, referred The Republic to the board’s website for an explanation of how the board works. When pressed further, he said he wouldn’t comment about Rasmussen and wouldn’t say why.
His recommendation: Call the Governor’s Office.
A spokesman for the governor said he’d look into the matter but did not follow up.
The only insight any board member provided about the decision-making process for approving nursing home administrators was that applicants must pass fingerprint clearance from the state Department of Public Safety.
But that’s a step in the process Rasmussen failed because of his prior convictions. He had to apply for an exception from the Board of Fingerprinting to get his clearance. In his statement for a “good cause exception,” Rasmussen claimed he had sent all the money he raised from investors to an overseas partner. At one point, Rasmussen wrote that he was sent a check “as part of the funding process” that ended up being fraudulent.
Rasmussen said his partner then stopped responding to his emails and phone calls and did not return any money. He “just disappeared.” Rasmussen added he wasn’t able to immediately pay back the two men and eventually he lost his house and his credit was ruined.
“I was being scammed,” Rasmussen wrote. “But I was so consumed by the greed of what could be.”
Rasmussen scored his clearance card in October 2019. He then applied to become a nursing home administrator the following month, which involved furnishing a couple of references.
“Mr. Rasmussen has been a symbol of integrity and responsiveness in all dealings that I have had with him over a 10 year period,” wrote James Tewksbury . “He has proven to be an individual of high moral character.”
Tewksbury told The Republic that the two had worked together for years at Grand Canyon University. He said he didn’t know about what happened at Granite Creek. When asked if he knew about Rasmussen’s felony record, Tewksbury said he didn’t feel comfortable answering personal questions.
He declined further comment.
Another letter from Kirt Garrett said: “Having known Mike for 32 years, I can certify there is no reason he should be denied a license. Mike is a hard working, caring individual who has others’ needs first on his mind.”
Garrett did not return calls for comment left with his office in Utah, or an email sent to the address listed in Rasmussen’s license application.
‘People who took advantage of me’
The board’s licensing specialist, Zakiya Mallas, initially told Rasmussen his application was incomplete, directing him to send her a copy of the police report, court disposition and the back of his fingerprint card. She also questioned why he didn’t mention all the colleges he attended and why he was unemployed from January through March of 2019.
Rasmussen sent Mallas the required documents and said he didn’t include the other colleges because he didn’t graduate from them. He added that he had been out of work in early 2019 because he had to go through an “extensive interview process” with his new employer after Dream Center shut down.
It is unclear the extent to which Mallas compared Rasmussen’s claims about being scammed to his arrest and court documents. But his application records do show a photocopied sticky note indicating an attempt to reach the Department of Real Estate.
By Jan. 6 — just three business days after Mallas received his criminal records — she sent him a letter telling him he’d have to come to the next nursing home board meeting in February to discuss his criminal charges.
What happened next could only be described as Rep. Rodriguez put it: “A friendly encounter.”
During the February meeting, Mallas told the board that Rasmussen had been charged with five counts of fraud and convicted of two and she repeated Rasmussen’s claim that a business partner took his money and ran. She mentioned that he was denied his fingerprint card before getting clearance on a good cause exception.
The only board member who voted against approving his license — Nina Louis — also would not comment when contacted by The Republic. She would not even say whether she was the same board member who asked Rasmussen at the meeting how he could assure the board he wouldn’t commit the same crimes again.
“It’s hard for me to consent for somebody who has this type of past to be put in front of our residents the way that they are, to include the federal dollars,” the board member said, according to an audiotape. “How can you guarantee to this board that you will not commit a crime, the same one?”
Rasmussen responded by saying he needed help getting a line of credit and he was convicted of fraud because of the way the deal was phrased and “the type of collateral that was given.”
He told the board he was embarrassed.
“It’s the one-time instance in my life where I made a bad decision with the wrong people who took advantage of me and walked off with all that money,” Rasmussen said. ”But I felt responsible for it, so I worked very hard to pay those people back.”
Asked whether his partner who took off with the money also got prosecuted, Rasmussen said: “They couldn’t find him.”
There was no further follow-up. No one asked about how he got the $1.7 million check from Walgreens. No one asked him about being required to pay restitution.
One board member simply praised Rasmussen’s efforts to pay everyone back.
“I’m truly impressed that you paid back people because that would not necessarily be a requirement,” the board member said. “I’m sure that took a lot of doing.”
Except for Seal-Villafranca, The Republic could not confirm which board member said what during the recorded meeting.
Seal-Villafranca did check with Rasmussen to see if there were controls at Granite Creek to prevent fraud from occurring in the future. But when Rasmussen started explaining that the nursing home is connected to Ensign Services, a NASDAQ-listed company that owns more than 230 skilled nursing facilities in 13 states, Seal-Villafranca interrupted him and said: “That’s all you have to say,” causing others in the room to laugh.
“I know they have layer upon layer of oversight with their resource teams,” Seal-Villafranca said.
Within moments, the meeting was over. Rasmussen’s license was approved.
About five months later, at least 15 residents were dead and more than 50 had caught the virus.
Dana Kennedy, state director for AARP Arizona, questioned why the voting members even want to be on the board “if they have so little interest in what happens in long-term care facilities.”
“They were concerned more about if he would have access to the finances,” Kennedy said.
The Phoenix New Times and the Daily Courier in Prescott both reported in July that employees claimed they were being forced to report to work sick, and that an outbreak was happening inside Granite Creek. Rasmussen responded to the New Times at the time, saying it was appropriate for staff members who were asymptomatic and had tested positive for the virus to work with COVID-19 patients at the facility.
The state Health Department also published two reports from its inspections that summer.
A June report cited the facility for not following guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention about washing hands and wearing protective equipment, while a July report detailed how at least 10 staff members at Granite Creek tested positive for COVID-19 or displayed symptoms that included coughing, sore throat, muscle pain and headache. Yet emails and text messages show that Rasmussen, the director of nursing and the staffing coordinator still permitted employees “to work with non-Covid and Covid positive residents.”
One staff member told investigators that he/she tested positive for COVID-19 and was instructed by the staffing coordinator, the director of nursing and Rasmussen that “all Covid positive staff still needed to report to work because it was the facility’s policy.” While at work later that day, the employee texted Rasmussen and the other two managers saying that he/she was short of breath and his/ her oxygen saturation level was dangerously low. The staffing coordinator replied that the facility had no one to replace the employee and he/she was still on the schedule for the next day.
The staff member visited a physician before work the following day who told him/her to “immediately go to the emergency room.” The staffer texted Rasmussen and the other two Granite Creek managers asking for a replacement because “it hurt to breathe.” Rasmussen texted back saying they were trying to get someone else. But no one ever called the staff member back and he/she “ended up working a 12-hour shift on a nonCovid unit.”
On July 1, a state inspector ordered Rasmussen to immediately make a plan that would prevent Granite Creek from making sick employees work. But the very next day, the inspector found that 10 symptomatic employees were still working at Granite Creek. Only one had been sent home.
It took Rasmussen five attempts to make a corrective plan good enough for the inspector’s final approval.
A Republic investigation at the end of 2020 found that staff at the licensing board only provided members with the June report from the state Health Department and they waited until November to do so.
When Seal-Villafranca asked board members during their November meeting if they wanted to investigate Granite Creek’s leadership about its failure to follow CDC guidelines based on the June report, everyone stayed silent and then voted unanimously against the idea.
“OK, thank you. That takes care of that,” Seal-Villafranca said.
Contacted by The Republic in December, the board’s former executive director said the state had not sent the July report about employees being forced to work while infected with COVID-19.
“We would not know about it unless ADHS sent it to us,” Allen Imig told The Republic in January. “If it had, the board would have reviewed it.”
The July report was posted on the state Health Department’s website, but a spokesman for the Health Department said staff didn’t automatically send it to the licensing board because it fell outside the bounds of automated criteria.
In January, after The Republic’s inquiries, Imig acknowledged seeing the report and said he would put it before the board, which opened an investigation into Granite Creek’s management at its next meeting on Feb. 8. Imig was recently replaced by Kahn.
AARP’s Kennedy questioned how the board and its staff could possibly not have heard about what happened at Granite Creek sooner.
“Aren’t they monitoring what’s happening with all these facilities in the pandemic?” she said. “There doesn’t seem to be any accountability whatsoever. They obviously don’t take their job
very seriously.”
‘Letting people’s loved ones die’
Once or twice a week, 90-year-old Delores Emberlin climbs into her white Honda CRV and winds 20 miles past the scrubby, rocky hillsides that stand between her and her husband.
On this particular day in March, a ceiling of dense fog cuts off surrounding mountain peaks and a dark grey sky spits hail and snow. She’s worried about driving home.
Joe will want her to spend the night. And she wants to. But she knows if she does, he’ll want her to stay every night. And that will make things more painful than they already are because she can’t stay every night.
So instead they will embrace for a couple sweet hours, mostly in silence, and she’ll head home.
It wasn’t always like this. Delores is one of the dozens of people whose lives have been upended because their loved ones happened to be at Granite Creek last summer. Nursing home administration board members may not remember why they let a convicted felon with nearly no health care experience run that facility, but brokenhearted families live out the consequences of that choice every day.
Courtney and Kathryn Frasier lost their 61-year-old mother, Stacey.
Kay Vetere lost her 63-year-old husband, Jeffery.
Irene Scheidt lost her husband, 73year-old John. He’d gone to Granite Creek for brief rehab following knee surgery. He came out with a fatal case of COVID-19.
Families of former residents have filed at least nine lawsuits against Granite Creek, its parent companies and Rasmussen so far, saying that their negligence and recklessness resulted in their loved ones catching COVID-19 and, in most cases, dying.
The suits accuse Rasmussen and his management team of failing to follow infection control regulations; of knowingly creating an unreasonable risk of harm; of failing to evaluate, train, manage and supervise Granite Creek employees; and of delaying the declaration of a staffing emergency for weeks, putting patients at further risk.
“Defendants acted to serve their own financial interests,” said one of the lawsuits drafted by Prescott attorneys Christopher Jensen and Sean Phelan. “These violations were done to minimize Granite Creek operating expenses and generate increased profits for the Ensign Network.”
Most lawsuits, including the one by Delores and Joe Emberlin, were filed at the end of March and the defendants have not yet filed a response.
Delores considers herself as one of the lucky ones. Joe survived COVID-19. She did, too. But he’s too weak to live at home with her and now she has to be on oxygen for 24 hours a day.
Last summer, Joe slipped when he was moving some boxes in the garage. He broke his pelvis. Delores and her 61year-old son James took him to the hospital, which sent him to Granite Creek for rehab. He could still hobble, but he needed therapy. His time away from their cozy ranch-style home was supposed to be temporary.
Delores and James visited Granite Creek once to drop off a care package for Joe. They both remarked about how nice the grounds are. The facility stands on a hill, surrounded by green grass and well-manicured bushes, next door to a Lutheran church.
“I had no idea what the inside was like,” Delores said.
Granite Creek called Delores about two weeks after Joe was admitted to tell her to come pick him up. He had finished therapy and was ready to go home.
She and her son were shocked when an employee rolled Joe out in a wheelchair.
“He looked like he was half-dead,” James said. “He was supposed to be through with his rehab, but he looked 10 times worse than when he left here. I have no idea why they released him.”
The facility provided no discharge papers, no instructions and no indication that he might have COVID-19, James said. No one mentioned that a couple of staff members had tested positive for COVID-19 and they suspected a few residents had it at that point, Delores said.
No one suggested Joe should get tested. His family says no one considered the ramifications of releasing a patient with COVID-19 symptoms to his then-89-year-old wife who has COPD.
Joe had a cough. A deep, dry hack. And he could barely move.
Delores called Granite Creek and asked to speak with Rasmussen. She wanted to know why she’d been given no instructions when he was discharged. She wanted to know if the facility had ever tested Joe for COVID-19. She wanted to know if he even got the therapy he was admitted for.
Rasmussen called her back, once. She missed the call. She said she called him back numerous times but never got him on the phone.
Delores and James tried to care for Joe at home for a couple of days but they struggled to lift him when he needed help. One night, Joe fell out of bed and, as James hoisted him back up, Joe coughed in his face.
It was unsustainable. Delores had the Veterans Administration hospital take him in. Within hours, the hospital called with terrible news. Joe had COVID-19. And Delores and James had better get tested.
Sure enough, they had both caught the virus.
The next couple of weeks were a blur. Delores got extremely tired. James developed a cough, headache, full body aches and fatigue.
James taped the phone number for LifeLine Ambulance Services to the fridge. He was certain he’d have to call it at some point.
Thankfully, he never did. But neither he, nor Delores nor Joe were ever the same. James has battled fatigue. Severely weakened after his stay at Granite Creek, Joe needed around-the-clock care to get better.
Joe hasn’t fully regained his strength and has moved into a private group home in Prescott. But Delores said the main thing keeping them apart is her lasting effects from COVID-19.
Joe was struggling with dementia long before the Granite Creek incident, so Delores was taking care of him and doing all of the tasks around the house. Now, she gets winded if she tries to do the dishes.
Delores’ COPD got worse after she caught the virus and has never gotten better. If Delores leaves the house, she has to lug an oxygen tank with her. She now leans heavily on her son to get by.
“There’s no way I could take care of Joe,” Delores said. “I can barely take care of myself.”
So Delores has brought stacks of photos to make Joe’s room feel like home. She covered an entire dresser with pictures of his grandchildren. She hung portraits on the walls of him and his brother when they were younger.
Joe hopes his time away from their cozy ranch-style home is temporary. Delores thinks not.
For now, all that is certain is that 20mile stretch of road between them.
Delores said she doesn’t understand how a facility associated with such a large publicly traded company could be so negligent. She feels that she was lied to about everything. About how many sick people the facility had, about the sick employees coming to work.
But the responsibility doesn’t stop at the edge of the well-manicured lawn on that hill in Prescott.
She thinks what the board did by giving Rasmussen the keys should be considered criminal.
She was taken aback that the board’s former president wished Rasmussen good luck.
“Good luck,” she said. “While you’re letting people’s loved ones die.”