Defendants in nursing-home deaths say evidence was destroyed
Two healthcare workers charged with aggravated manslaughter last year in connection with the deaths of 12 people at a stifling hot Hollywood nursing home are asking a judge to dismiss the cases against them, claiming former Gov. Rick Scott destroyed evidence that would have helped their defense.
Residents of the nursing home began dying three days after Hurricane Irma made landfall in South Florida on Sept. 10, 2017, with the power knocked out and the facility sweltering in tempercellphone atures that reached 99 degrees. Broward County prosecutors charged four workers at the facility, claiming the former employees neglected their duties and failed to provide adequate care in the aftermath of the hurricane.
Two of the workers — Sergo Colin, a former nightshift nursing supervisor at The Rehabilitation Center at Hollywood Hills, and Jorge Carballo, who was the facility’s administrator — filed a motion to dismiss this week, asking a Broward County judge to toss out the cases against them because they say the state violated due process by destroying voicemails that nursing-home employees left on Scott’s in the days following the storm. Scott had given out his number before the hurricane and told administrators they should call him directly for assistance, the men said.
Following the deaths, which were blamed on the lack of an electrical supply to the facility’s air-conditioning system, Scott sought to place the blame elsewhere “so as to cover up the debacle at RCHH that he personally created,” the motion to dismiss claimed. And despite knowing that effort would include pursuing criminal charges against nursinghome workers, Scott ordered voice messages with cries for help to be destroyed, the men said in court documents.
“As a direct result of Governor Scott’s order to destroy the recordings so as to cover up his own failings, the jury in this case will never have the opportunity to listen to heartfelt and desperate pleas to Governor Scott to please order [Florida Power &
Light] to restore power to the A/C chiller,” the motion read.
In September 2017, Scott’s office told reporters who asked for the voicemails through public-records requests that staffers had deleted the voice messages after they were transcribed.
Colin and Carbolla have used transcripts of voicemails and texts to Scott’s phone in their defense, but their attorney, Jim Cobb, said that’s “not the same as actually hearing the voices, the voices of concern, the voices of panic and perhaps voices of pleading.”
In response to the accusations, Scott’s Senate office — he was elected as Florida’s junior senator in 2018 — said Colin and Carballo were being held accountable for “their inexplicable failure to call 911 when people were in need.”
“Every child knows that when there is imminent danger, 911 is the number to call,” a spokeswoman for Scott said. “Yet, trained health staff at this facility didn’t even do that. In addition to not calling 911, the nursing home never pursued transferring its residents to the hospital located directly across the street that had full power.”
Cobb, the defense attorney, said after the charges were first filed last year that Memorial Regional Hospital across the street was “slammed” at the time and had no capacity to take residents of the nursing home.
A spokeswoman for the Broward County State Attorney’s Office, which is prosecuting the case, declined to comment, saying the attorneys would file their response in court in the coming weeks.
Ben Conarck: 305-376-2216, @conarck