A caretaker at a Potomac assisted living group house taped shut the mouth of an 84-year-old woman suffering from Alzheimer’s “to keep her quiet,” according to state officials, who shut down the house after discovering “numerous”instances of alleged abuse.
The Department of Health and Mental Hygiene also reported that the caregiver yelled at her patients and said she didn’t write an incident report when one of her patients fell and hit her head on a bedrail because the caretaker “cannot read or write English.”
But the chief executive of the group home, called AAA Warmcare of Potomac, told the state’s investigator that she allowed the caretaker to administer medication to the home’s seven patients even though she couldn’t read English, according to the state’s report. The chief executive officer said she would later indicate on reports that she had administered the medication and not the caretaker, the report says.
Lt. Paul Starks said county police are investigating and the caretaker is a suspect.
The report doesn’t name the caretaker or the CEO, but state records list Raju Datla as the owner of AAA Warmcare and Sreedevi Datla as the company’s resident agent. The Datlas own three other group homes in Montgomery County, according to state officials.
The Datlas could not be reached for comment but their lawyer said that they “anticipate that they will be fully vindicated.”
State inspectors visited other facilities associated with the Datlas “virtually immediately” after shutting down AAA Warmcare and found no serious problems, said health departmentspokesman David Paulson.
One is Silver Spring Assisted Living Home, which was slapped weeks before the closing of AAA Warmcare with 43 pages of alleged violations, including a failure to prove that it had run criminal background check on some of its employees.
The second facility is AAA Atrium Classic Assisted Living. Last year an inspector on an unannounced visit found a handful of violations with the house, including an “offensive urine odor” in one resident’s bedroom and bathroom.
There are no records of complaints against the third, Rockville Assisted Living.
The state’s report says that a witness came forward with photos showing that several residents were mistreated, including an 88-year-old woman suffering from dementia whose hands were tied to her wheelchair during mealtimes so that she wouldn’t bite or scratch the caretaker.
The Gazette first reported that the state shut down AAA Warmcare.
County officials housed the patients with family or in a different assisted care location after shutting down AAA Warmcare.
