Fighting for Justice ~ the beginning
"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."
Edmund Burke
After work on Thursday, January 2, 2020 I went by Franklin Park Memory Care to visit my father like I had done so many other times since we had moved him in there on October 25, 2019. We sat and talked, he dozed off a little and then we talked some more and this was the cycle off and on during my visit that evening. In the few months that he had been there I had been thinking more and more about how I could check in on him during the day and on days that I didn't stop by. I gave him an Echo Show for Christmas but that was harder for him to use without help from the caregivers. I could "drop in" on him but I was a little afraid to do that and scare him. So I decided to look into putting cameras in his room and after looking at several I finally made my selection and got it all ready to place in his room that evening.
On my way there I had made sure the batteries were installed but the one thing I had to wait to do when I got there was connect it to the WiFi. During one of the times he dozed off I quickly plugged in the sync unit and opened up the back of the camera so I could pair it with the app on my phone and connect the camera and sync unit to the WiFi at the facility. My moving around got his attention and I had to stop or he would be asking too many questions and I really didn't want to explain why I was putting a camera in his room. Luckily he dozed off again and I was able to quickly place the camera in a temporary location on top of the wardrobe and I had it angled where I could see quite a bit of his room. At this point I planned on coming back on Saturday with two of his grandchildren who could get him out of his room and keep him occupied while I placed the camera in a spot that was more "permanent" and captured a better view of his entire room. We visited for a little while longer and the I told him it was time for me to go but I would be back real soon. I gave him a hug and kiss like I always did, told him I loved him and also told him to behave, to which he gave me his normal response... "Ah...that's no fun." with a grin on his face.
It was nice to be able to check in on him every now and then throughout the day, even though he wasn't in his room most of the day, he was in the common areas of memory care. I would get an alert on my phone when he or someone else went into his room and set off the motion detection on the camera. Unfortunately, Friday evening it was set off when it caught him falling out of bed. The camera didn't catch the full act of him falling but it caught him getting back up from off the floor so that was the safest guess was that he had fallen off the bed. This was late in the evening on Friday, January 3, 2020. I saw that he was ok and didn't think much more about it at that time since I saw him up and moving around like he normally did so I knew in my gut at that point he was alright. This was the first day of having the camera in his room and I had already started my routine of waking up in the morning and checking to see if anything happened during the night and also checking in on him just before I went to bed, especially since I didn't stop by and see him that evening after work.
The morning of Saturday, January 4, 2020 I woke up, picked up my phone and went out into our family room and sat down in the recliner and pulled up the camera app. I checked to see if any clips had been recorded overnight, there had been so I started to go through them. In a clip recorded at 5:03 am I see one of the caregivers go in to my father's room and press the button on the wall that essentially means that the room is empty. I found out later that this caregiver's name is Hannah Ajiboye. The next clip I saw shocked me and still does every time I see it. In the clip which was recorded at 5:06 am you see Hannah Ajiboye entering the room with my father and it appears that she has him by the right upper arm. She can then be heard saying "Now hear this" and then she forcefully either pushes him down or pulls him down from a standing position into a chair in his room. After pushing him down you can see her reflection in the pictures on his wall as she walks to his door and leaves the room as he is moaning and calling out for help. My father went down into the chair hard enough that the chair rocked backwards far enough it bumped into the wardrobe. You can tell this because on top of his wardrobe near where the camera was placed was a small stand with an American flag and Swedish flag and both of those flags are seen moving right after he goes down. It takes a little bit but my father gets up and goes to the door still calling for help but there is no caregiver seen on the video coming to his aid as he exits his room.
When I see this video I am in shock and really don't know what to do. I decide that I am going to go ahead and get ready to go over there but without my son and daughter as originally planned. As I'm getting ready I get a phone call from one of the weekend day shift caregivers who knows my dad and his normal behavior and mannerisms pretty well. She says that there is something going on with dad, he's not himself and she then asks me if he'd been seeing things. (This was her first day back after being gone for a while.) She also let me know that a hospice home health nurse was there assessing my father. When I noticed they walked into his room I called them on the Echo Show and we discussed getting him to the ER for evaluation. I told them I was on my way and would be there in 30 minutes or less. Not only was my father suffering from Alzheimer's at this stage of his life, he had suffered from scoliosis his entire life and where your normal spine is supposed to be straight, my father's spine was almost a perfect "C". This caused him pain every day but he took it well.
When I got to his room the hospice nurse was checking him out and the day caregiver was in there as well. My father was what I would consider severely agitated for him and I noticed there was a broken picture frame behind the chair that I believe he had been forced down into and the nurse told me that when she arrived the small Christmas tree that I had in his room on a table next to that chair was on the floor as well. The nurse told me that there was some swelling in his lower back not attributed to his scoliosis and it was tender to the touch. That is when I let the two of them know about what I saw on the video. I told them first about the falling out of bed but that he seemed fine right after that but that he was moaning and in obvious pain and discomfort after the other incident. We decided to go ahead and have him transported to the hospital by ambulance and once the paramedics were there that agitated my father even more. He was usually the even keeled person in the family and would just typically go with the flow but not this day, he was not happy about going to the hospital and when it came time to put him on the transport gurney to move him to the ambulance he put up a fight with the paramedics and it took a couple of them to get him calmed down and restrained enough to give him some meds before they transported him. As we were leaving Franklin Park I stopped and spoke with the manager on duty and showed her the clip on my phone. She was appalled to say the least and asked if I could email the clip to the facility director. and I told her I would.
to be continued...
