Daughter says her dad “was doing really well” until alleged negligence contributed to his death.
By Stephanie Zimmermann
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The family of a Bolingbrook man who was left alone to
bleed to death in a nursing home —and then had his iPhone swiped from
his room after his body was removed — is suing the facility for
negligence.
Jaime Hernandez, 66, was recuperating at an Aperion Care
facility in Forest Park after getting a kidney transplant at the
University of Illinois-Chicago Medical Center a month earlier.
He’d waited seven years to receive a new kidney and all signs were looking good, said his daughter, Maria de Lourdes Gutierrez.
“He was doing really well,” Gutierrez said.
Gutierrez took her dad for a regular appointment with his
UIC doctor on Oct. 25, 2018, then brought him back to the nursing home
at 8200 Roosevelt Road, where he had been staying for 17 days.
His UIC doctor had said Hernandez’s blood pressure looked
good and his new kidney was doing well, Gutierrez said. Her dad was
looking forward to watching his beloved Club America Mexican soccer team on TV and eating his favorite foods when he fully recovered.
“He was so happy,” she said.
According to the lawsuit naming Aperion, Berkshire
Nursing & Rehab Center LLC and several employees as
defendants, a health care staffer was supposed to check Hernandez every
two hours as well as regularly check his forearm, where he had a fistula
from a dialysis catheter. The lawsuit says the nursing home should have
known that he was at risk for a hemorrhage in that arm.
Video of the nursing home hallway later obtained by
police showed that no one entered Hernandez’s room for at least three
hours before he was found in a pool of blood on the floor of his room’s
bathroom, said attorney Margaret Battersby Black with the firm Levin
& Perconti.
Battersby Black added that staffers allegedly lied to police about the last time they’d seen Hernandez alive.
To make matters worse, Gutierrez said her dad’s iPhone
disappeared from his room shortly after. She said her niece tracked it
with the Find My iPhone app, watching in horror as it left the nursing
home building and traveled down the Dan Ryan Expressway before going
dark.
The lawsuit claims the phone was stolen by a nursing home
worker who had an active arrest warrant in Iowa for theft, dependent
adult abuse and forgery.
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Aperion Care did not respond to a request for comment Wednesday.
On its website, the company says its employees “provide a
level of personal caring that goes well beyond providing post-hospital
rehabilitation and long-term skilled nursing care.”
The lawsuit also contends that Aperion knew it was
understaffed because the Illinois Department of Public Health had cited
it for providing inadequate staffing less than a month before Hernandez
arrived.
The suit was filed on behalf of Hernandez’s widow, Maria
Guadalupe Rios Valdez, his daughter Gutierrez and two other daughters
and two sons. It seeks monetary damages for 17 alleged specific failures
of the nursing home to properly care for Hernandez.
Gutierrez said the worst part was the suddenness of her
father’s death, which occurred just as the family thought he had rounded
a corner in his recovery.
“It was great, the doctors were saying everything is
good,” she said of the kidney transplant surgery. “You’re thinking it’s a
new life for him.”
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Lawsuit: Nursing home allowed man to bleed to death, then employee stole his phone
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