The surest sign that something was amiss at the Lexington Nursing & Rehabilitation Center came when unusually young and agile residents started showing up in local bars, drinking and returning to the nursing home to fight.
In just the last couple of months, police in this otherwise quiet town 11 miles north of Bloomington found themselves responding to a knife fight at the home, as well as an attack on a staff member and several cases of younger nursing home residents roaming the streets at all hours.
Earlier this week, the state Department of Public Health put a stop to the mayhem by shutting down the nursing home and scattering its elderly residents to other facilities around the area. According to police and public health authorities, it turned out that the home’s four primary owners had brought in homeless people from a Chicago shelter to relocate to the facility and fill empty beds.
The past few weeks have left the town’s four-man Police Department scrambling. Usually, “our goal is to keep the kids in line and watch the bars, and suddenly 38 percent of our police reports were generated from the nursing home,” said Lexington Police Chief Spencer Johansen.
Saddled with a money-losing operation, the home’s owners brought in the new residents with the hope that their presence would bring in additional government money, state officials said. The owners all live in the Chicago area, and some have interests in four other nursing homes in Illinois, state officials said.
State regulators identified the four as Richard Benkin, Michael Weis, Joel Gross and Lee Cotton. State officials said they were not aware of any significant problems at the other facilities owned by members of the group.
In addition to shocking Lexington, the nursing home closure is an embarrassing episode for the Chicago Christian Industrial League, the respected 91-year-old Chicago social service agency that runs the Chicago homeless shelter.
The league acknowledged Wednesday that it had quietly been funneling homeless men to the Lexington facility, a place with a long history of safety and health violations.
As a result of the controversy, the league’s community outreach program is evaluating how the men and women were referred to the home, said Dennis O’Keefe, director of development for the agency.
The younger residents, ages 21 to 46 and most with criminal records, told police they had agreed to go to Lexington after being promised substance abuse treatment, horseback riding and use of a swimming pool.
But the closest thing the six younger residents got to treatment was being signed up for Thursday night Alcoholics Anonymous meetings at the local Lutheran church. As for the promised amenities, “There’s a horse across the street [from the home], but I don’t think it’s been ridden in years,” Johansen said with a smirk. “And I don’t know where the pool is.”
The Lexington home’s troubles provided a fresh example of an Illinois nursing home industry that is riddled with mismanagement and inadequate care. Just hours before state officials closed the home on Monday, three Illinois Democratic congressmen released a study of Chicago-area nursing homes that showed 229 of 290 are not in full compliance with federal standards of care.
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The fact that a small nursing home in a town of 2,000 people would take young homeless men from Chicago underscores a nationwide problem facing the industry: an unprecedented number of empty beds.
At the time of the closure, the 52-bed Lexington home had just 26 residents, including six new arrivals from Chicago. For the owners, each filled bed represented an average of $75 a day in state and federal reimbursements. However, state Public Aid officials said Wednesday that they had not yet given the home any Medicaid money for the newly arrived residents.
The Chicago-area owners of the Lexington facility issued a statement Wednesday that said: “The facility intends to contest this matter and adamantly denies any justification for the [Public Health] Department’s actions.”
The owners also stated they had “every intention of seeking a hearing as quickly as possible. The department waited until 5 p.m. to execute its surprise transfer and notice and, therefore, take away from the facility its opportunity to request an injunction, a right granted it by state statute.”
Johansen said he assumed “the Illinois State Police are looking into” the possibility that some sort of fraud was occurring in this case. But a state police spokesman, Master Sgt. Lincoln Hampton, would not say if there is a pending investigation involving the home.
The home’s closing left some former residents and their family members with mixed feelings.
Marge Tallon, a 79-year-old retired State Farm Insurance employee, said she had fine care from her attendants in the two years she lived in the home. Noting that the younger residents “had fights at night,” she said, “They never bothered me any, but the noise and all that kind of stuff–I just didn’t like that.”
Police and public health officials said no elderly residents were injured by the younger residents, five of whom were dropped off in a van at the Industrial League’s doorstep late Tuesday or early Wednesday. Officials of the league said they did not know who drove the five back to Chicago.
“At night these individuals would come into the TV room and tell the other residents who were there that they were going to watch what they wanted, and if they didn’t like it, they could leave,” said Public Health spokesman Tom Schafer. “The other residents at some times felt intimidated or terrorized by these individuals.”
Tallon’s son, Danny, said his mother was clearly shaken up when he arrived Monday night while the police were shutting the facility down. She told him: “I’ve been scared here the last few weeks. You can’t imagine what goes on here at night.”
“I’m glad they closed it down before someone else got hurt,” he said. “But it was so much easier to visit mom.” Marge Tallon has moved up the road to the much newer Meadows Mennonite Retirement Community.
In a town where the police get suspicious calls about door-to-door salesmen, outsiders quickly draw attention. The fact that most of the newcomers were young, African-American men made them stand out even more in the virtually all-white town.
A couple of weeks ago, Danny Tallon, a postal carrier, was knocked into by one of the young men as he approached Tallon to ask for directions to the local high school. Worried that the man might be headed to the school to harm a student, Tallon said he called the police, who found the young man walking near the school. He had gone to pick up a schedule for school sporting events.
“He seemed like he was sincere about getting some help,” Johansen said. “And he was pretty disappointed when he arrived here and realized there wasn’t any rehab program.”
Authorities also questioned why individuals with criminal records had been sent to live with elderly residents.
One of the other new residents in question, Wayne Lee, 46, served several stints in state prison for five separate convictions, including robbery, burglary and theft. After Lexington police arrested Lee for allegedly slapping a female resident of the home who also had come from the Chicago shelter, Johansen said he found that Lee had a 42-page criminal history and 21 aliases.
“If you’re in a nursing home, this ought to be your medical records, not your criminal history,” the chief said.
Another resident, Irving White, 47, faces charges of aggravated battery after he was accused of trying to cut the throat of another younger patient with a 9-inch knife, authorities said. The other man leaned back and was only nicked with the blade, police said.
The trouble with the younger residents was only the most recent problem at the Lexington home, according to a private nursing home watchdog group.
Violette King, president of Nursing Home Monitors, said her group filed a complaint against the home last December with the Health Care Finance Administration, the federal agency that certifies nursing homes for Medicaid and Medicare participation.
“In the state of Illinois, there have never been criminal charges filed against owners of nursing homes or licensed personnel for neglect of residents,” King said. “We’d like to know why nursing home residents are treated like second-class citizens in Illinois, like they’ve lost their rights under the law.” `They never bothered me any, but the noise and all that kind of stuff–I just didn’t like that.’
Marge Tallon, former nursing home resident
A social service agency in Chicago acknowledges sending homeless men to a Downstate nursing center.