North Carolina Injury Lawyer Blog

The daughter of Carrie “Christine” Evans is suing a North Carolina nursing home for her mother's wrongful death. Serita Cheryl Evans is accusing Millicent Boutchway Shylon, the owner of Primrose Retirement Villa IV, of nursing home negligence leading to Carrie Evans's fatal fall accident earlier this year.

According to the North Carolina wrongful death complaint, the 85-year-old, who was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and hypertension, wandered away from the facility, fell into a ravine, and died from the head injury she sustained when she fell.

The civil lawsuit contends that the Angier nursing home workers knew that the 85-year-old was at risk for wandering yet did not do anything to prevent her elopement. Not only did Evans's nursing care plan note that she could become disoriented and forgetful, but it also indicated that she was physically fit enough to walk at a fast pace for long distances without help. Evans also had a history of leaving the facility without help on several occasions. Despite having this information, the North Carolina nursing home did not make sure that she was constantly supervised.

The complaint claims that on February 1, the night the elderly resident wandered off, no one was available to give her the medication she needed for her nerves and sleep deprivation issues. Also, the security system used to prevent patients from wandering was not working. The system had not been inspected since 2005.

After Evans died, the Harnett County Department of Social Services fined the Angier nursing home for a number of safety violations, including failure to properly supervise residents so that they are protected from serious injury and not correcting certain care quality issues that the state of North Carolina had been asking the nursing home to fix for some time now. Inadequate training has also been an issue, say inspectors.

The state has inspected Primrose Retirement Villa IV 28 times in the past two years. Usually, it is standard for the state to investigate a North Carolina nursing home no more than four times a year.

Serita Cheryl Evans is seeking at least $10,000 from the Harnett County assisted living facility.

Daughter Of Resident Who Fell To Her Death Sues, DunnDailyRecord, June 15, 2009

Related Web Resources:
Nursing Home Compare, Medicare.gov

Harnett County Department of Social Services, Harnett County

Why Do Wandering Management Systems in Nursing Homes Fail?, EzineArticles.com,

With almost 300 kids under age 5 drowning in pools and spas every year, it is important that spa owners and managers implement all the necessary safety precautions to prevent more North Carolina child drowning injuries and deaths from happening.

Safety initiatives that pool and spa owners and supervisors can take:

• Make sure that the pool is fenced in and that the barricade is high enough to prevent children from being able to climb over or open the gate without adult supervision.
• Don’t allow kids into a pool or spa without adult supervision.
• Install pool alarms just in case a child manages to enter the pool or spa area without supervision.
• Make sure that the person in charge of supervising the pool area is someone that knows how to swim and is actually paying attention to the kids that are in the pool.
• Install the new federally mandated pool and spa safety drains that are designed to prevent kids and adult from getting suctioned to the bottom of the pool or spa and drowning.

Drowning accidents are often fatal. Earlier this month in Raleigh, a 5-year-old boy drowned at the North Hills Club pool. Some 50 people were there attending a party at the time of the tragic North Carolina drowning accident and there were four lifeguards on duty.

According to police, the child went to the pool area with an aunt and uncle. He wandered to the adult pool while they stayed by the children’s pool. A swimmer saw the boy at the bottom of the pool. Lifeguards retrieved the him and they performed CPR while waiting for paramedics. The child was taken to WakeMed where he was pronounced dead.

In May, a Greensboro boy also died n a pool drowning accident. The tragic incident occurred in South Carolina. According to the coroner’s office in Myrtle Beach, Owaes Tabbakh was at the Beach Colony Resort when a lifeguard discovered him floating in a pool. The lifeguard performed CPR on him until paramedics arrived. Emergency workers were unable to revive the boy who was later pronounced dead.

In the event that an adult or child survives a North Carolina or South Carolina drowning accident, he or she may be left with permanent traumatic brain injuries. The drowning victim may require lifelong, round-the-clock, costly medical care.

Child drowns in North Hills Club pool, WRAL.com, June 10, 2009

4-year-old drowns in Myrtle Beach, CarolinaLive.com, May 29, 2009

Related Web Resources:
Pool and Spa Submersion: Estimated Injuries and Reported Fatalities, 2009 (PDF)

Virginia Graeme Baker Pool Spa and Safety Act (PDF)

PoolSafety.gov

Continue reading "North Carolina Premises Liability: Two Recent Child Drowning Accidents in Hotels Claim Lives" »

In the last year, optical products company Bausch & Lomb has settled almost 600 products liability lawsuits related to its ReNu MoistureLoc multi-purpose contact lense solution. Dozens of other individual personal injury complaints are still pending.

Over 700 contact lenses users in the US and Asia claim that they suffered from Fusarium keratitis because they used the solution, which was pulled off US store shelves in April 2006. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that from June 2005 to September 2006 there were 180 confirmed cases in 35 US states. After that point, the CDC stopped its surveillance.

Seven people in the US reportedly had to have an eye removed because of the infection and at least 60 people had corneal transplants to save their vision. A racecar driver’s career ended as a result of his injury. Another person who lost his eye became addicted to painkillers, resulting in the collapse of his marriage and business.

Fusarium Keratitis
This rare infection can lead to inflammation of the cornea. Victims often experience severe pain. Delayed diagnosis has been known to occur and can cause the infection to grow worse. One woman didn’t know about the recall and suffered from the infection for two months. She lost an eye.

It is still unclear how the contact solution played a role in the mass fungal outbreak. One theory is that its disinfectant got into the lenses at a very high rate and the moisturizing agents produced a biofilm that either shielded or helped grow the fungus until the infections occurred.

MoistureLoc has also been linked to different types of viral, bacterial, and parasitic ailments. Plaintiffs have filed over 500 products liability lawsuits for their injuries. One woman claims that after her eye became infected she sustained a scar that blurred her vision and took a year to heal. Bausch & Lomb is denying that there is a link between the solution and these infections.

Bausch & Lomb settles 600 eye fungus lawsuits, AP, May 31, 2009

General Information about Fusarium Keratitis, CDC, May 10, 2006

Related Web Resources:
Bausch and Lomb

Instructions for Cleaning Contact Lenses

North Carolina officials are reporting an increase in complaints of possible elder abuse and neglect incidents, with an approximately 20% increase in the the number of requests made between ’06 –’07 and ’07-’08 to state adult-protection officers asking that they further investigate the allegations. One reason for this, according to state ombudsmen for long-term care Sharon Wilder, is that the number of people older than 60 living in North Carolina is on the rise.

By 2030, there are expected to be almost 2.9 million seniors over age 60 living in the state. Wilder also says the number of North Carolina elder abuse complaints are increasing because the children of elderly people living in North Carolina nursing homes are less likely to put up with allowing their loved ones to become the victims of caregiver abuse or nursing home neglect. State officials say that 15% of elder abuse incidents happen in long-term care facilities, with the other incidents taking place in private residences.

One challenge to investigating elder abuse and neglect allegations is that in certain cases, the victim may be too sick or frail to report what is happening to him or her. The News & Observer recently published an article about one case involving Della Jarrett, an 88-year-old woman staying at a Raleigh nursing home. She had unexplained bruises on her face, and no one from Sunnybrook Healthcare and Rehabilitation could explain to Jarrett’s daughter, Doris Weaver, why her mother’s eye and face were bruised and swollen. Jarrett has advanced dementia and cannot walk or roll over.

Weaver reported the incident to Raleigh police. Meantime, Sunnybrook officials suspended an employee but deny that Jarrett was the victim of nursing home abuse. North Carolina law defines caretaker abuse to include the intentional act of inflicting physical injury or pain and purposely depriving someone of services.

Yet even when a nursing home worker isn’t intentionally trying to hurt a resident or withhold the proper care, injuries and accidents can happen. Nursing inexperience can lead to fall accidents, failure to properly clean a resident’s wounds, failure to follow specific feeding procedures, and poor resident supervision.

Abuse hard to verify if injured can't speak, The News & Observer, June 3, 2009

National Center on Elder Abuse

Related Web Resources:
Nursing Homes, Medicare.gov

North Carolina Division of Aging and Adult Services

Continue reading "The Number of North Carolina Elder Abuse and Neglect Complaints is Rising, Say State Officials " »

In Buncombe County Superior Court, a man has filed a North Carolina child sex abuse lawsuit seeking damages for the physical and emotional abuse he says he allegedly suffered as a teenager at the hands of two priests at the Basilica of St. Lawrence in Asheville. One of the priests that he names as his perpetrator, pastor Father Justine Paul Pechulis, died in 1983. The other priest he says molested him is retired Father John McCole.

The defendants named in the North Carolina clergy sexual abuse lawsuit are the Diocese of Charlotte and the Archdiocese of Philadelphia. The plaintiff, Steven Souder, claims that church officials took part in a conspiracy to protect pedophile priests, including McCole and Pechulis.

Souder, who used to be an altar boy, says that the two priests forced him to take part in group oral sex while on a trip to Asheville during the 1970’s. He accuses McCole of taking advantage of him and sexually abusing him several times. McCole denies the alleged abuse incidents ever happened. Souder’s complaint also claims that when he reported the abuse to a higher ranking clergy member, he was told that what was happening to him wasn’t inappropriate.

The plaintiff, who suffers from mental illness, says he repressed the memories of the abuse for years until 2007 when the archdiocese sent him a letter talking about clergy sex abuse.

North Carolina law doesn’t count the time when a person’s memories of sexual abuse were repressed toward the statute of limitations for filing sexual abuse lawsuits. The statute of limitations only begins running after the memories have been recovered.

Clergy Sex Abuse
In the last seven years, hundreds of people have come forward claiming that priests sexually abused them. Even as the clergy sex abuse scandal rocked the United States, victims in other countries also stepped forward to make similar allegations against the priests in the areas where they lived. The leaders of the Catholic Church have been accused of covering up the abuse incidents for decades, which has allowed pedophile priests to strike at new victims over and over again.

Sexual abuse of any kind causes serious personal injury to victims and their families and can be grounds for a North Carolina personal injury lawsuit.

'70s altar boy alleges abuse & that Krol abetted cover-up, Philadelphia Daily News, June 2, 2009

Sex abuse lawsuit names deceased Asheville priest, Citizen-Times, June 2, 2009

Related Web Resources:
Spotlight Abuse in the Catholic Church, The Boston Globe

Basilica of St. Lawrence

Over-correcting when driving is a common cause of North Carolina car accidents. A driver ends up off the road, overreacts to the situation, and over-corrects in an attempt to avoid causing a motor vehicle crash. Unfortunately, what can end up happening is that by quickly turning the steering wheel to prevent an accident from happening, a single-vehicle rollover or a collision with another motor vehicle can result.

In January, Joseph Gerald Hart, 16, died in a Raleigh head-on collision with a delivery truck. The teen driver had over-corrected after driving off the road. In November 2007, 16-year-old Joel Duran drove off Interstate 40. While over-correcting, his SUV rolled over. Two of his passengers, 23-year-old Elizabeth Arch and 17-year-old Zepherino Duran were ejected from the vehicle.

Zepherino sustained critical injuries and Arch died from hers. Joel has been charged with assault with a deadly weapon inflicting serious injury and manslaughter.

Adults, too, have known to over-correct. The Highway Patrol makes its troopers practice how to reenter the highway safely and correctly.

Last January, a school bus driver who over-corrected struck an SUV, killing its driver. The North Carolina bus driver, Trumeka Deon Wilson, was charged with misdemeanor death by motor vehicle.

Unfortunately, over-correction and other driving errors can lead to catastrophic North Carolina car accidents that can cause serious injuries or deaths. In these instances, it is time to contact an experienced Raleigh, North Carolina car crash law firm about your case.

Other common mistakes that can lead to catastrophic North Carolina motor vehicle crashes:

• Drowsy driving
• Speeding
• Swerving out of one’s lane. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration says that 15,574 people died in US traffic accidents in 2007 because a driver swerved out of their lane.
• Drunk driving
• Failure to yield
• Running a red light
• Reckless driving
• Not wearing a seat belt

Over-correcting linked to many accidents, WRAL.com, May 21, 2009

Most Lethal Driving Mistakes, MSN.com

Over Correction- One of the Most Common Mistakes Teens Make, ParentalCourage.com, May 22, 2008

Related Web Resources:
National Highway Traffic Administration

Teen Drivers, CDC