When Tennier was finally allowed to enter the building that November, she said, the red flags were everywhere.
Donahue’s room was dirty, her bedding never changed, according to Tennier. Donahue wasn’t being showered regularly. There were often no hand towels or toilet paper in her unit. At some point, Tennier noticed staff was delivering Donahue’s lunch not on a plate, but on a napkin.
The complaint states that state investigators, during an inspection back in 2018, “had observed … that toilets were not flushed, dry feces on toilet seats and dirty sinks in residents' bathrooms.”
Upon visiting, Tennier said, she’d walk down the hallway to a linen closet and retrieve fresh sheets to make her mom’s bed. She would help Theresa into the shower and do the bathing herself.
Tennier said she complained about her mother’s care to the on-site managers. They responded by instructing Tennier to call the facility before visiting, she said. A staff member later told her the managers would call a meeting before her arrival, to make sure Donahue and her room were cleaned up.
Falling down
The first time Theresa Donahue fell, she was being pushed in her wheelchair over uneven flooring. A month and a half after, on March 1, 2021, a staff member at MuirWoods found Donahue on the floor in front of her bed; she had fallen while unattended.
After the third fall, on March 18 of that year, Tennier had seen enough. She resolved to remove her mother immediately from MuirWoods and found an available bed at a small board-and-care home. That was on a Thursday. Tennier was scheduled to move Donahue on Sunday, but she never got the chance.
On Saturday, Donahue fell a fourth time, again while walking without assistance. As the family alleges, though Donahue was “screaming in pain,” staff members did not transfer her to the hospital until Tennier arrived and demanded it. There, Donahue was diagnosed with a fractured hip and underwent surgery.
There were other problems, according to the lawsuit and interviews. Tennier believed her mother had scabies, an itchy rash caused by a burrowing mite. MuirWoods officials denied it until Tennier convinced them to send Donahue to a dermatologist; the doctor wrote her a prescription for scabies.
Two months after Donahue left the site for good, MuirWoods contacted Sonoma County Public Health to report a scabies outbreak, according to an investigative report by the Community Care Licensing Division, which is part of the California Department of Social Services.
Complicated corporate ownership
MuirWoods Memory Care, MBK Senior Living and associated business entities were found liable for negligence and elder neglect, according to a May 5 court order detailing the jury verdicts. The jurors were asked specifically whether they found the owners acted “with recklessness, malice, fraud or oppression?”
The jury responded “yes” to recklessness and oppression but “no“ to malice and fraud.
Guadagni, in an email, said the legal definition of “oppression” means the defendants’ conduct “was despicable and subjected Theresa Donahue to cruel and unjust hardship in knowing disregard of [his/her/its/their] rights.”
Malice, she said, requires intent. Guadagni said the jury’s decision represents the belief that the defendants knew the harmful risks of understaffing, inadequate staff training and management, and that they disregarded those risks and chose to continue operating without making necessary changes.
In petitioning for a new trial, defense lawyers blamed the pandemic, not a lack of caring, for the workforce shortages.
“Ms. Donahue resided at MuirWoods during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic,” they wrote in a June 20 memo to Judge Pardo. “During that time, there were well-documented staffing shortages throughout the long-term care industry in California and the entire United States.”
As Pamela Hardesty, MBK Senior Living’s regional director of operations, testified, “It was horrifying. It was a terrible time. I think I worked 20-hour days supporting my communities. MuirWoods, the same thing. All of our communities were working as quickly as they can to follow ... the state regulations that change daily. Following the CDC guidelines.”
The legal entities that were sued in this case were the facility itself, MuirWoods MSL LLC; MBK Senior Living LLC, the facility’s parent company and owner; and MSL Community Management LLC, the management company that ran the facility.
Such multipronged business arrangements are common among large corporate owners of assisted living facilities, senior advocates said.
MBK Senior Living is owned by MBK Real Estate, a developer and investor of senior living communities, multifamily residential and industrial real estate properties. MBK Real Estate is a wholly owned subsidiary of Mitsui & Co., Ltd, a global Fortune 500 company.
