The family of an 83-year-old Alzheimer’s resident is suing a Charleston-area memory care facility after she walked out an unsecured door at night, was found hours later covered in ant bites, and died weeks afterward. The case turns on one of the most basic obligations a dementia unit has: keeping a resident with a known history of wandering inside the building.
Elopement — a resident leaving a facility unnoticed — is one of the few events in long-term care that is almost never defensible. Secured dementia units exist precisely because residents with Alzheimer’s lose the judgment needed to recognize danger outside, and because many of them, like Catterton, cannot call for help once they are in trouble.
The safeguards are well established and inexpensive: door alarms and delayed-egress hardware that actually function, wander-detection bracelets, staff assigned to monitor exits during overnight hours when supervision is thinnest, and an elopement risk assessment that follows a resident with a known wandering history into the care plan. A resident who has wandered before is not an unforeseeable risk. She is the exact resident these systems are designed for.
The overnight hours are where these systems most often fail. Staffing is at its lowest, common areas are empty, and a single unsecured door can go unnoticed for hours. In cases like this one, the questions that decide liability are narrow and answerable: was the door alarmed, was the alarm working, was it turned off, who was assigned to monitor exits, how long was the resident missing before anyone noticed, and what did the facility’s own elopement risk assessment say about her.
The injuries that follow an elopement are frequently catastrophic out of proportion to the lapse that caused them. An elderly resident outdoors and unable to move or call out is exposed to heat, cold, insects, falls, and traffic. The interval between a door left unsecured and an irreversible injury can be a matter of hours.
Families place a loved one in memory care specifically because they can no longer keep them safe at home. The entire premise of a secured dementia unit is supervision — that someone is watching the doors when the family cannot. When a resident with a documented wandering history leaves through a door that should have been locked or alarmed, the failure is not a tragic accident. It is a breakdown in the one protection the family was paying for.
If your loved one wandered from a nursing home, assisted living facility, or memory care unit and was injured or died, the records will show what the facility knew and what it had in place: the elopement risk assessment, the care plan, door alarm maintenance logs, overnight staffing assignments, and the incident report. Bedsore.Law reviews those records to determine whether the harm was preventable. Call 844-407-6737 or reach us at bedsore.law/contact for a confidential review at no cost.
WCBD News 2 — https://www.counton2.com/news/local-news/lowcounty-alzheimers-patient-suffers-nearly-1000-ant-bites-family-sues-care-facility/
