State shuts down Clarkston group home over living conditions, staffing levels

Reports states one instance where workers failed to notice resident had passed away ‘for hours’

CLARKSTON, Mich. – An Oakland County group home is shut down by the state of Michigan after claims of how residents were being treated.

The state’s latest investigation that shut down Heather Pines goes back to May. It found numerous violations from staffing levels to resident care.

Investigators from the Michigan Department of Licensing and Regulatory Affairs (LARA) spoke with current and former employees as well as outside hospice nurses who said the conditions for some of the residents at Heather Pine were unpleasant.

The report states that facility residents were repeatedly left on the floor after falling out of bed during the midnight staff shift.

Several residents were often left in soiled diapers and conditions for hours including once with a nurse “observed Resident X lying in bed soaked in urine and feces that had begun to stick to her skin.”

An outside nurse said staff was not consistently changing a man’s bandage on his neck, causing it to get infected again. As she bathed him “a family of maggots was discovered in the neck wound.” The report states she removed 28 maggots from the wound.

According to the report, direct-care workers on July 29 failed to notice that a resident “had passed away for hours.” The woman’s relative arrived to find her at the dining table hunched over in her wheelchair with mucus stretching from her nose to her lap.

The state found that the vice president of the company falsified the incident report, saying that the resident out in the dining area for 30 minutes before she died. While the owners believed that, the woman’s daughter told Local 4 that it was four hours and her mother was cold to the touch.

The owners of Caremore Assisted Living, which owns Heather Pines and several over facilities -- blame the violations on bad employees.

Eleven residents needed to be removed, some who were moved to another facility under the same owners.

Watch the full report in the video above.

More: Oakland County news


About the Author:

Jason is Local 4’s utility infielder. In addition to anchoring the morning newscast, he often reports on a variety of stories from the tragic, like the shootings at Michigan State, to the off-beat, like great gas station food.