Safety of residents in danger?
As a follow up to yesterday's entry about Georgia's ridiculous and dangerous idea to house mentally ill prisoners and sexual offenders in nursing homes, I saw this tragic article on the Chicago Tribune's site.
The article discloses a newly obtained government report and interviews show that a registered sexual offender allegedly groped a mentally impaired woman at the facility last month. The Asta Care Center of Toluca in central Illinois failed to investigate the incident, implement an appropriate care plan for the sexual predator, Frank Aoskad, or properly monitor him to protect others. Aoskad is alleged to have molested female residents in two prior incidents at the Asta Toluca home and a sister facility in Bloomington, according to state investigators.
Facility attorney Michael Siegel acknowledged to the Tribune that administrators erred in not interviewing Aoskad or the female about the alleged sexual abuse, as required. A Tribune article Friday chronicled allegations of sexual abuse against Aoskad, 80, as part of a wider examination of Illinois nursing homes' failures to notify local law enforcement that they housed convicted sex offenders, as required by law, or to implement plans to isolate, monitor and treat the offenders inside the facilities.
Aoskad was moved back to Toluca this summer and given a state assessment calling him a "high risk" of danger to others. The report, dated Oct. 26, says that a mentally disabled woman told her sister that Aoskad groped her. When later interviewed by state investigators, Aoskad denied touching the woman.
