The nonprofit that helped April Montford move home to live with her daughters is investigating how the 40-year-old Baltimore paraplegic died in what a doctor called one of the worst neglect cases in five years.
“We?re going back and examining everything that happened in this case,” said Barbara McCord, spokeswoman for the Coordinating Center, a Millersville nonprofit that helped Montford move from a nursing home to an apartment. “This was a huge shock to us. Our coordinators have significant contact with the family.”
Montford, 40, was found in bed Feb. 29 with gangrenous open wounds and bedsores with lice and maggots in them, according to police. She had a month?s worth of urine and fecal matter on her, and her uterus had fallen outside her vagina because of neglect, police said. She died Friday.
Baltimore police have charged Tia Sewell, 25, and Sharon Jones, 24, who both lived with their mother on the 400 block of West Franklin Avenue, with vulnerable-adult abuse, first-degree assault and reckless endangerment. In 2006, Montford was quoted in The Examiner about the Coordinating Center, which helps 15 to 25 people a month transition into the community from care facilities.
“It?s been a wonderful thing, especially [having the center] set up my personal care provider, because I really needed one,” Montford said at the time.
McCord said Coordinating Center employees check on patients once a month; state law requires checks only once every three months.
“This is the first time we?ve ever experienced anything of this magnitude,” McCord said. “We?re very saddened by it. They went through the training that?s necessary to take care of their mom. She had emergency communication equipment and an emergency plan. We would have expected those kind of procedures to have prevented something like this.”
The state paid Montford?s daughters $13 an hour, officials said.
State Sen. Lisa Gladden, a Baltimore City Democrat, is sponsoring a bill that would increase maximum penalties for elder abuse from 10 years to 15 years in prison.
“The state hired these girls to do it, and they didn?t and that?s wrong,” Gladden said. “We?re getting older as a community as the baby boomers advance. We need to do something about this.”
Examiner Staff Writer Jaime Malarkey contributed to this story.
