Some of the victims
can't speak. They rely on walkers and wheelchairs to leave their beds.
They have been robbed of their memories. They come to nursing homes to
be cared for.
Instead, they are sexually assaulted.
The unthinkable is happening at facilities
throughout the country: Vulnerable seniors are being raped and sexually
abused by the very people paid to care for them.
It's impossible to know just how many victims are
out there. But through an exclusive analysis of state and federal data
and interviews with experts, regulators and the families of victims, CNN
has found that this little-discussed issue is more widespread than
anyone would imagine.
Even more disturbing: In many cases, nursing homes
and the government officials who oversee them are doing little -- or
nothing -- to stop it.
Sometimes pure -- and even willful -- negligence is
at work. In other instances, nursing home employees and administrators
are hamstrung in their efforts to protect victims who can't remember
exactly what happened to them or even identify their perpetrators.
In cases reviewed by CNN, victims and their
families were failed at every stage. Nursing homes were slow to
investigate and report allegations because of a reluctance to believe
the accusations -- or a desire to hide them. Police viewed the claims as
unlikely at the outset, dismissing potential victims because of failing
memories or jumbled allegations. And because of the high bar set for
substantiating abuse, state regulators failed to flag patterns of
repeated allegations against a single caregiver.
It's these systemic failures that make it
especially hard for victims to get justice -- and even easier for
perpetrators to get away with their crimes.
"At 83 years old, unable to speak, unable to
fight back, she was even more vulnerable than she was as a little girl
fleeing her homeland. In fact, she was as vulnerable as an infant when
she was raped. The dignity which she always displayed during her life,
which was already being assaulted so unrelentingly by Alzheimer's
disease, was dealt a final devastating blow by this man. The horrific
irony is not lost upon me ... that the very thing she feared most as a
young girl fleeing her homeland happened to her in the final, most
vulnerable days of her life."
Sonja Fischer is shown here in earlier days. She is pictured at top
of this story during the last years of her life, with her daughter
Maya's haunting quote.
Maya Fischer made this statement in court at the
2015 sentencing of a nursing assistant convicted of raping her mother.
Choking back tears, Fischer detailed her mother's story -- recounting
how she had fled Indonesia as a youth with her family to escape the rape
and killing of young girls by Japanese soldiers, only to fall victim
decades later to a man whose job was to care for her.
A fellow caregiver saw male nursing assistant
George Kpingbah in 83-year-old Sonja Fischer's room at 4:30 a.m. on
December 18, 2014, at the Walker Methodist Health Center in Minneapolis.
A bare leg was on each side of his hips, and her adult diaper lay open
on the bed. When the witness noticed the 76-year-old aide thrusting back
and forth, she said she knew a sexual assault was occurring.
Kpingbah ultimately pleaded guilty to third-degree
criminal sexual conduct with a mentally impaired or helpless victim and
was sentenced to eight years in prison. In an emotional statement
directed at Kpingbah during sentencing, the judge told him he had done
more than ravage the lives of his victim and her family. He had betrayed
the public trust granted to caregivers who have such intimate access to
the sick and elderly.
"You violated (a) position of authority, a position
of trust," Judge Elizabeth Cutter said at the sentencing hearing. "The
ramifications of what you did are so far-reaching. ... It also affected
everyone in that facility. Everyone who stays in that facility. Everyone
who works at that facility. It affects everyone who has to place a
loved one in a facility."
Kpingbah apologized at the hearing and said he
planned to take his Bible with him to prison. His attorney asked for
leniency. Kpingbah had endured his own personal struggles as a refugee,
the attorney said, fleeing Liberia after many of his family members were
killed. Kpingbah's one "unspeakable act," he told the judge, was
completely out of character.
Yet in court documents uncovered by CNN,
prosecutors revealed it wasn't the first time Kpingbah had been
investigated over sexual assault allegations. Personnel records obtained
by prosecutors during the investigation and reviewed by CNN show
Kpingbah was suspended three times as Walker Methodist officials
investigated repeated accusations of sexual abuse at the facility,
including at least two where he was the main suspect.
The earliest complaint was in 2008, when police
investigated allegations he had engaged in sexual intercourse with a
65-year-old who suffered from multiple sclerosis. In another case, an
83-year-old blind and deaf woman who lived on the same wing as Fischer's
mother said she was raped multiple times -- always at midnight. Police
investigated her report just seven months before Fischer's mother was
assaulted. While the woman could not identify her assailant, Kpingbah
was suspended by the facility along with several other male staffers who
were on duty during the nights of the alleged assaults. (
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Full Article & Source:
Sick, dying and raped in America's nursing homes
