Dementia patient victim of illegal nursing home eviction

Supple said that Single not only threatened other patients but was a danger to herself and that Pioneer House called for emergency help only after Single threatened to jump from a

sixth-story window. He said that she would “lose it” whenever she saw her husband and that the facility does not have a dementia unit and therefore couldn't meet her needs. None of this

adds up for Jones. He said he only heard the allegation that his mother threatened to jump from a window — which sounded physically impossible to him — at the appeal hearing, nearly two

months after she was abruptly discharged. He said plenty of people living in the facility had dementia, including his stepfather. And when Jones visited a couple times a week, he said

he'd usually find his mom and stepfather sitting side by side, holding hands. This is not to say that she wasn't a handful at times. He knows she was. “These are not easy issues; I

understand that. But you have to be decent,” Jones said. “Really what they needed to do is sit down with me and say, ‘To be honest, look, the situation is not working out, and we're

going to try our hardest to find an alternative situation for you, for your mother and for Bill.'" He might not have liked to hear this, but he said it would have saved them all

from the pain that followed. "When you take somebody into your nursing facility … and when you take on the payment from the government for taking on that person, you're basically

warranting that you're not going to dump them and you're not going to just get rid of them when it becomes inconvenient for you,” said plaintiffs’ co-counsel Matt Borden of

BraunHagey & Borden, a San Francisco law firm. “And if it's more work for you, too bad. That's the deal that you made when you took them on.” Beyond the desire to avoid extra

work, Borden and others involved in the case suggest that greed, a frequent culprit in dumping, played a role in what happened to Single. A Medicare patient, for example, brings in more

government money than a patient on Medicaid — or Medi-Cal in California — such as Single. "Her care requirements were really the same care requirements that any facility would provide,”

said Leza Coleman, the executive director of the California Long-Term Care Ombudsman Association, which is also a plaintiff in the lawsuit. “It's just, for the dollar, Medi-Cal's

reimbursement wasn't sufficient to cover the amount of need that she had.” Supple, the defense attorney, pushed back on these accusations. He insisted Pioneer House left Single's

room untouched for months, and unfilled by anyone else, in anticipation of her return. If the facility did expect her to come back, Jones says he never knew it. When he picked up her

belongings, he said they were in the basement. SACRIFICING TO PUT HER SONS FIRST Both Single and her husband have died since this litigation started. But Jones, a molecular biologist in

Davis, California, remains a committed plaintiff. "It's just so wrong, and I don't want this to happen to anybody else,” he said. “I couldn't let it go. My mother was

that way, too. When something was wrong, she really tried to fix it.” That was especially true when it came to her children, Jones said: She was loving and protective of her three boys. When

their father, her first husband, lashed out, she defended them. If a teacher or baseball coach did wrong by her sons, she spoke up to make sure they were treated fairly. The family

didn't have a lot of money growing up, but she made sacrifices to put her sons first. “She went to secondhand clothing stores, while we always had new clothes,” Jones said.