Tuesday, February 11, 2014

Canada Asks the Question: What do You do With the old and Dangerous?

What do you do with a man like Jack Furman? A volunteer selected some 70 years ago to join an elite commando squad: the First Special Service Force. A lad from tiny Fort Macleod, Alta., trained to leap from planes, climb mountains, detonate explosives, launch amphibious assaults and survive behind enemy lines in wartime Europe—a man trained to kill for king and country, with grenades, with guns, with stiletto, with garotte, with bare hands. Furman did these things, and came back alive and was called a hero, though he rarely spoke of it.

What do you do with such a man, who now languishes in a fog of dementia; a man locked in a Kamloops, B.C., psychiatric centre, because this past August—at age 95—he is alleged to have killed again? This time Furman’s victim was not an enemy combatant, it was 85-year-old Bill May, a father of three, a retired executive at a glass company near Vernon, B.C. He was Furman’s roommate in Vernon’s Paulson Residential Care dementia unit—a facility that was supposed to honour, respect and protect both men in the last act of their lives.

Tragically, murder in a dementia ward isn’t an anomaly.

Full Article and Source:
Old and Dangerous: Senior Violence is Getting Worse

4 comments:

StandUp said...

In America, we just put them in facilities with the general population and don't even tell the families that these dangerous people are in the facility.

honeybear said...

Many people have been harmed or even killed by old felons and even killers who are in nursing homes.

Anonymous said...

In Virginia, a seriously mentally ill man with four felony convictions attacked and beat a 92 year old woman at Oakwood, one of Scott Schuett's six hellholes with 400 people.

That occurred in April 2012, after Scott Schuett had already begun to lose license after license for his facilities.

Nevertheless, it took another year and a half, until October 1, 2013, for the Commonwealth of Virginia to get off its derriere and shut these dangerous, filthy places down.

Anonymous said...

Oh, and our public officials want to put more felons in nursing facilities.

Both James Rothrock, the head of the Virginia Department for the Aging and Rehabilitative Services, and Gail Nardi, the head of Adult Protective Services for the state, have singled out "prisoner re-entry" as a necessary initiative.

"Prisoner re-entry" is a euphemism for the state dumping elderly lifers next to your gramma in a nursing home so they can get Medicaid and relieve the Department of Corrections of medical costs. No worries about the effect of this misguided plan on lawabiding elders.