The family of a man who died after spending a year at a nursing home has filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the facility.
Family members claim their 72-year-old father had a highly infectious disease for a year, and staff didn’t treat it.
Charles Brush died last March at a hospital after being rushed there from the Avenue at Broadview Heights Care and Rehabilitation Center the previous month.
Jennifer Brush, the man’s daughter, said she received a voicemail from her father that February that prompted immediate concern.
“Jenny, this is me. I want you to call me back as soon as you get my phone call. There’s something going on here,” Charles Brush said in the voicemail. “Yesterday, they kept me in isolation for I don’t know why. Now they’re doing it again to me. I didn’t eat yesterday. I didn’t eat, probably not eating today.”
Jennifer Brush, who lives in Colorado, said her father sounded confused, saying his room had been sealed off and he wasn’t being fed.
She immediately called the nursing home.
“I knew something was wrong with my dad,” she said. “I called my sister right away because I’m not physically there, and I asked her to please go do a welfare check on him.”
That’s when Heather Brush visited her father.
“When I went there, I had to put a mask on to go in, and it was, the door was shut and sealed,” Heather Brush said. “And he wasn’t even acting himself, like at all. He didn’t even know who I was.”
She added, “When I walked into his room, it was freezing. When I looked at the temperature, it was 52 degrees in there. Like he was huddled in a wheelchair with a blanket wrapped around him and shaking.”
Jennifer Brush questioned the nursing home about why her father had been isolated for a week.
“They said it was a staph infection at first. The nurses did. But the director clearly communicated it was not a staph infection. It was this Candida,” Jennifer Brush said.