Limiting nursing home liability over serial rapist: Lt. Gov Ron Ramsey co-sponsored 2008 TNGA bill

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Lt. Governor Ramsey co-sponsored 2008 bill to limit possible National HealthCare-Bristol liability over serial rapist

State nursing homes trying to limit liability
http://nashvillecitypaper.com/content/city-business/state-nursing-homes-trying-limit-liability
Monday, March 31, 2008 at 12:10am

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Other lawmakers though, like Lt. Gov. Ron Ramsey (R-Blountville), believe nursing homes need something from the state to help them with liability.



TNGA Lt. Governor Ron Ramsey

If they don’t, proponents of the tort reform legislation say some nursing homes could be forced to close their doors. NHC’s Coggin pointed to 123 nursing homes being sold in Florida between 2000 and 2003 before tort reform was passed.

In Tennessee, Kindred Health Care sold half of its nursing homes located in the state, Coggin said.

“I do believe that we’re getting to the point of a crisis here in the state of Tennessee,” Ramsey, a co-sponsor of the bill, said.

The Crisis:

How did serial rapist elude capture for years?
http://www2.tricities.com/tri/news/local/article/how_did_serial_rapist_elude_capture_for_years/47858
By MICHAEL OWENS | Reporter / Bristol Herald Courier
Published: June 20, 2010
Updated: June 20, 2010



(photo caption)Police here never tried to question former nursing aide James Wright when he emerged as the prime suspect in the sexual assault of a nursing home patient in July 2007, a Herald Courier investigation shows.

BRISTOL, Va. – Police here never tried to question former nursing aide James Wright when he emerged as the prime suspect in the sexual assault of a nursing home patient in July 2007, a Herald Courier investigation shows.

Instead of contacting their prime suspect, police crossed Wright off their list and closed the case without an arrest after three days.

At the time, police already were working a rape case that opened three months earlier and involved the same nursing home, but documents show there was a different suspect. Yet, investigators never talked to him, either.

Even with another top suspect, the case eventually pointed to Wright, who has since been convicted of several sexual assaults at National HealthCare-Bristol.

Police files note that Wright became a suspect only after a private investigator hired by a local attorney began making inquiries.

But even with hints dropped by the investigator, the idea that a serial molester might be running free still didn’t click with local law enforcement.

Instead, the Bristol Police Department did nothing until the Virginia Attorney General’s Office called in May 2009 to ask what officers knew about Wright.

The answer, one detective wrote in a memo then, was not much. But she responded that she would pass along any allegations to prosecutors so a decision could be made on how to proceed. Someone had to first make specific allegations, she wrote.

By then, Wright already had left the nursing home for a job at an assisted-living facility. He might not have been hired, however, had allegations that he’d physically assaulted his mother been caught by the Virginia State Police background check commissioned by his new employer.

When state investigators stepped in to corral Wright in August 2009, they had uncovered slightly more than a dozen attacks on patients in two adult homes – most attributed to Wright.

Four of those molestations and rapes happened after local police had crossed Wright out as their main suspect.

Questions

National HealthCare-Bristol workers began to suspect Wright was molesting patients as early as 2000. Yet no one mentioned him to police until July 6, 2007, case files show. The police report mentioning Wright is five pages long. One page includes witness testimony, three more pages are little more than checklists detailing when and where the alleged crime happened, and a single page includes a check mark through a box next to the word “unfounded.”

(...much more at hyperlink)