Locked kitchen, no staff, bugs: SC suspends licenses of four assisted living facilities
A resident of one residential care home was admitted to a hospital with wounds crawling with maggots and bed bugs. In another facility, inspectors couldn’t find any staff members, the kitchen was padlocked, and residents couldn’t remember when they’d last eaten or received their medication.
These were just some of the conditions cited in two emergency suspension orders released by the South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control on Friday. The orders suspended operations at two community residential facilities in Columbia and two in Charleston County.
In a statement released Friday, DHEC stated that the agency had relocated residents of the four facilities.
The order named Reese’s Community Care Homes No. 1 and No. 2, both located in Columbia. DHEC lists the addresses of Reese’s Community Care Homes as 1203 E. Muller Ave. and 717 Cindy Drive. In Charleston County, the agency also filed emergency suspension orders against two Bowles Community Care Homes.
But James S. Reese, Jr., the owner and administrator of the two Reese Care Homes, strongly denies the majority of DHEC’s allegations.
“We’re a small mom-and-pop facility. I love my residents; I take good care of them and I always have,” Reese said. “By no means will I say that my facility is perfect, but not to the point that it was a threat to anybody’s health.”
The emergency orders suspending the facilities’ licenses described squalid conditions and neglect by staff members across the four community residential care facilities. Also called assisted living facilities, the facilities are intended to provide housing, meals and health care to individuals who are unable to live on their own, such as the elderly or those suffering from serious medical conditions.
“It is the responsibility of community residential care facilities to operate in compliance with all applicable laws,” Gwen Thompson, DHEC’s director of healthcare quality, said in a news release.
“If a facility creates a dangerous living condition, we will take immediate and decisive actions to protect residents, who are always our top priority.”
Both Reese Care Homes were found to be in “deplorable condition,” according to the suspension orders. The buildings were described as having insect and rodent “residue” spread throughout, while roaches and bed bugs were said to be present in both facilities, according to the order.
At Reese Care Home No. 1, located just off of North Main Street, the only staff member present when inspectors visited on Dec. 8 and 9 had “inadequate training” to look after the residents, according to the order.
In Home No. 2, in the kitchen, inspectors say they found “rodent droppings and live insects crawling throughout the kitchen, the refrigerator, stove, and canned goods.”
The staff members also failed to administer medications properly, the order said.
Reached by The State, Reese broadly denied the “findings of fact” in the suspension order, describing them as unproven allegations.
He also vehemently denied perhaps the most serious allegation: That one of his residents was admitted to the hospital with maggots and bed bugs crawling in open wounds on her heels. The order describes the resident of Home No. 2 as being admitted to a hospital with wounds on her lower back, swollen legs and open ulcers on both heels that had become infested with bugs.
“That’s a baldfaced lie,” Reese said. “She came to the facility with (an edema) seven years ago, weighing 300-350 pounds. Nobody else would take her. I reduced her sodium, got her off soda pop, got her on fresh vegetables. But she got back on the soda pop... one of her legs swelled back up.”
Reese said that he convinced her to go to the hospital. While the resident had a heel spur, Reese said that he never observed any wounds or ulcers on her feet. Before the ambulance picked her up, he said that he cleaned a fold in the edema at the top of her foot with peroxide.
“I put peroxide in the crack which turned it white,” Reese said. “It may have appeared to be a maggot, (but) that lady did not have a maggot on her leg.”
Reese said that he challenged DHEC to produce images of the bugs in the resident’s wound.
“If that was true they would have video and a picture of it,” Reese said. “If you show anybody one picture of a bug I’ll shut my facility down.”
But Reese conceded that over the pandemic he had fallen behind on some record keeping and that both homes had gotten cluttered. He has been living in Home No. 2 himself for about three years, ever since a falling tree destroyed the roof of his house.
“Some of my books were out of order but paperwork does not constitute a direct threat to anybody,” Reese said.
While he admitted that bugs had been a problem at times, Reese strongly denied the order’s claim that his facilities were “infested with insects.” Inspectors were said to have observed roaches crawling throughout the facility and on residents.
“It wasn’t an infestation. It wasn’t like they were crawling all over the place,” Reese said.
He thinks that during a surprise visit to facility No. 2, a DHEC inspector saw a bug between the pages of a book that had been in a box in the corner of a room for two years.
“She hollered, she saw a water bug or something. I never saw it, but I believe that she did, but she didn’t see any live bed bugs,” Reese said. He maintained that the only evidence DHEC found of a bedbug at Home No. 2 was an inconclusive black speck, that didn’t have a head or legs.
But he did admit that there were roaches on the floor at facility No. 1, which he said he visited every day. Reese said that he had exterminators come in the day after the inspection to deal with the problem.
“In the past they say we saw evidence of bugs, but they don’t just shut me down. I’d get an exterminator, we’d get rid of the mattresses,” Reese said. Instead, he says that this time the inspectors didn’t give him an opportunity to go over and address all of the issues they found with his facilities.
“I’ve been doing this for 44 years and they always do an exit interview,” Reese said.
The state Department of Social Services removed the five residents from Reese’s Community Care Home No. 1, but one resident at No. 2 refused to go, Reese said. When spoken to over the phone, the resident, Mary Randolph, 77, said that she enjoyed living at Reese’s second facility and that she’d had no problem with bugs.
“if it was such an imminent danger why would DHEC, Department of Social Services and Adult Protective Services leave somebody in what was said to be such an unsafe environment?” Reese said.
“I’ve been a good man. I’ve been doing this for 44 years because I have a passion for helping others,” Reese said, his voice cracking. “I’ve been put under a lot of pressure. I’m not a neglecter. I’m a man of God.”
“It’s just a witch-hunt,” Reese said. “And God will vindicate me.”
Residents of Charleston County facilities left alone, without food
Meanwhile, the residents in one Bowles Community Care Home in McClellanville were found cold and hungry when the facility was inspected on Dec. 28, according to the DHEC.
Inspectors noted that staff was absent from both facilities for an “extended period of time.”
The residents could not remember the last time they had received medication or had been fed. The entrance to the kitchen was padlocked.
While a winter storm brought temperatures in South Carolina below freezing, there was no working heat inside of Home No. 2. The facility was heated only by “unapproved portable electric heaters” and temperatures in the home were found to be in the low 50s, according to the order.
The order suspending the license described these conditions as posing an immediate threat to the “health, safety, and welfare of the residents.”
Benjamin Bowles is listed as the administrator of the Bowles Community Care Homes on DHEC’s website. The State was unable to reach Bowles at any of the numbers listed by DHEC.
Seventeen residents of the Bowles facilities were relocated to other facilities.
DHEC guidelines state that a Community Residential Care Facility “offers room and board and, unlike a boarding house, provides/coordinates a degree of personal care for a period of time in excess of 24 consecutive hours.”
The facility is supposed to be “designed to accommodate residents’ changing needs and preferences, maximize residents’ dignity, autonomy, privacy, independence, and safety, and encourage family and community involvement.”
This story was originally published December 31, 2022 at 2:57 PM.