Nursing Assistant Fired, Charged After Posting Nude Video of 93-Year-Old on Snapchat

Photo by: Arman Zhenikeyev

Clarification, Jan. 19, 2016: This post has been clarified to explain how imprisonment in Wisconsin consists of both confinement behind bars as well as extended supervision.

A former nursing assistant at a Wisconsin assisted-living facility has been charged with a felony for allegedly taking a video of a mostly naked resident and posting it on Snapchat — the latest in a series of cases in which dehumanizing photos of seniors have been posted on social media.

The employee of Parkside Manor in Kenosha posted a video of a 93-year-old woman with Alzheimer’s disease and dementia sitting on a bed “in a bra and no underwear and no pant[s],” according to a criminal complaint filed last week in Kenosha County. She admitted her action to the facility’s executive director and said “it was immoral and very terribly wrong,” the complaint said.

The employee, Grace Riedlinger, 21, was fired and faces a charge of taking a nude photo without consent, for which she could be sentenced to 1½ years in prison and two years of extended supervision. She could not be reached for comment; her mother said an attorney had advised the family not to discuss the matter.

Last month, ProPublica identified 35 instances since 2012 in which workers at nursing homes and assisted-living centers have surreptitiously shared photos or videos of residents, some of whom were partially or completely naked. At least 16 cases involved Snapchat, a social media service in which photos appear for a few seconds and then disappear with no lasting record. The latest incident adds to those figures.

In a written statement, Parkside Manor’s operator said the company launched an investigation as soon as it learned about the incident and notified state regulators. The employee was terminated and the facility alerted the police department.

“The termination of this employee is consistent with our zero tolerance policy relating to actions contrary our code of conduct,” said David Richey, senior regional director of operations for Senior Lifestyle Corp., in the statement. “Actions such as this will never be tolerated at our community. Our code of conduct contains very specific guidelines to govern employee behavior and includes policies regarding social networking and the use of technology that the employee in question clearly violated.”

Rebecca Dutter, supervisor of Adult Protective Services in Kenosha County, said she was devastated by the incident.

“For those of us who work in this field, it’s such a violation of everything we do, knowing that a client was violated like this,” she said. “I guess it’s our worst fear. We’ve always hoped that it wasn’t happening here.”

After ProPublica’s article last month, U.S. Sen. Joe Donnelly, D-Ind., called on the Senate Aging Committee to investigate the issue. “It is troubling and disturbing that some seniors are unwillingly and unknowingly victims of exploitation and abuse on social media by some nursing home workers,” Donnelly, who serves on the aging committee, said in a statement. “That is why I am asking the Aging Committee to use all appropriate tools and resources to investigate this issue.”

Annie Clark, a spokeswoman for Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, who chairs the Senate Aging Committee, said, “Sen. Donnelly has raised a significant issue, and the Senate Aging Committee is currently inquiring into the troubling findings outlined in the ProPublica report.”

Collins and Sen. Claire McCaskill of Missouri, the committee’s ranking Democrat, requested a review by the Government Accountability Office of all guardianship abuses last September and anticipate a hearing on the issue later this year.

In the Parkside Manor case, the criminal complaint says Riedlinger told a police officer that on January 5, the resident was “giving her a hard time getting changed over for bed.” The resident “was playing tug of war with her and she thought it was funny so she took a video of the encounter and uploaded the video to Snapchat under her ‘story’ section,” the complaint said. (The story section of Snapchat allows users to share videos with all of their friends for 24 hours, as opposed to sending photos or videos to only selected contacts.)

The facility was alerted to the videos by a woman who attended school with Riedlinger and was her Snapchat friend, the complaint said.

The Kenosha News first reported the incident last week.

Dutter of the county’s Adult Protective Services said she hopes senior living facilities will re-evaluate their policies about employees using cell phones around residents.

“Facilities are going to have to figure out some way of eliminating the accessibility of their staff members to do such a thing,” she said. “There are some really, really, good, wonderful skilled nursing assistants, and I don’t want this to be a black eye to all of them, because I’m sure they are disgusted and outraged like the rest of us are too.”

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Nursing Assistant Fired, Charged After Posting Nude Video of 93-Year-Old on Snapchat

Nursing Home Workers Share Explicit Photos of Residents on Snapchat

A ProPublica review found 35 cases since 2012 in which nursing home or assisted living workers surreptitiously shared photos or videos of residents on social media. At least 16 cases involved Snapchat.

This story was co-published with the Washington Post.

Nursing home workers across the country are posting embarrassing and dehumanizing photos of elderly residents on social media networks such as Snapchat, violating their privacy, dignity and, sometimes, the law.

Janet Hartranft at the Newaygo Medical Care Facility

ProPublica has identified 35 instances since 2012 in which workers at nursing homes and assisted-living centers have surreptitiously shared photos or videos of residents, some of whom were partially or completely naked. At least 16 cases involved Snapchat, a social media service in which photos appear for a few seconds and then disappear with no lasting record.

Some have led to criminal charges, including a case filed earlier this month in California against a nursing assistant. Most have not, even though posting patients’ photos without their permission may violate the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, the federal patient privacy law that carries civil and criminal penalties.

The incidents illustrate the emerging threat that social media poses to patient privacy and, at the same time, its powerful potential for capturing transgressions that previously might have gone unrecorded.
Abusive treatment is not new at nursing homes. Workers have been accused of sexually assaulting residents, sedating them with antipsychotic drugs and failing to change urine-soaked bed sheets. But the posting of explicit photos is a new type of mistreatment — one that sometimes leaves its own digital trail.

In February 2014, a nursing assistant at Prestige Post-Acute and Rehab Center in Centralia, Wash., sent a co-worker a Snapchat video of a resident sitting on a bedside portable toilet with her pants below her knees while laughing and singing.

The following month, one nursing home assistant at Rosewood Care Center in St. Charles, Ill., recorded another using a nylon strap to lightly slap the face of a 97-year-old woman with dementia. On the video, the woman could be heard crying out, “Don’t! Don’t!” as she was being struck. The employees laughed.

And this February at Autumn Care Center in Newark, Ohio, a nursing assistant recorded a video of residents lying in bed as they were coached to say, “I’m in love with the coco,” the lyrics of a gangster rap song (“coco” is slang for cocaine). Across a female resident’s chest was a banner that read, “Got these hoes trained.” It was shared on Snapchat.

The woman’s son told government inspectors that his mother, who had worked as a church secretary for 30 years, would have been mortified by the video. Days after the incident, the home changed hands and is now known as Price Road Health and Rehabilitation Center. Greystone Healthcare Management, its new owner, said it “provides extensive, on-going training, support and oversight to insure that we provide patient centered care.” (The prior owner, Steve Hitchens, said the incident happened days before the home was sold and he does not recall details.)

In a statement, PrestigeCare said it fired the employee, alerted authorities and instituted new, stricter cellphone and social media policies. “We take these situations very seriously and are thankful that our own internal procedures alerted us so promptly to the issue.”

Rosewood Care Center did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

“Something hasn’t happened now unless there’s a selfie or Facebook posting about it,” said Marian Ryan, the district attorney of Middlesex County, Mass., whose office is pursuing elder abuse charges against two women who posted numerous videos of nursing home residents on Snapchat. “The use of social media is just pervasive across every aspect of society.”

ProPublica identified incidents by searching government inspection reports, court cases and media reports. Ryan said she suspects such incidents are underreported, in part because many of the victims have dementia and do not realize what has happened.  (Continue Reading)

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Nursing Home Workers Share Explicit Photos of Residents on Snapchat