Family Sues Georgia Nursing Home After 93-year-old Model Was Eaten Alive By Mites

2024 Author: Steven Freeman | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 08:15

Rebecca Zeni spent most of her youth making her dreams come true: she was a model in New York City, worked in a shipyard during World War II, and even on a television station in Chicago. In her last days, however, she suffered a slow and painful death in a geriatric in Georgia.

Zeni died on June 2, 2015, at the age of 93, about two years after contracting scabies during a epidemic of it at the Shepherd Hills nursing home in LaFayette in 2013, a family lawyer said. The autopsy revealed that the old woman died of septicemia due to scabies scabs - parasitic mites had gotten under her skin and lived there, laying eggs all over her body, she adds.

“In the end, his skin was breaking down. At that point I was very, very sick because of that,”Lance Lourie, a family attorney, told Zeni of People magazine. "The lawsuit is for damages caused by the horrible pain and suffering that Ms. Zeni endured unnecessarily."

Zeni's daughter, Pamela Puryear, is suing PruittHealth - the commercial company that owns the nursing home chain - and others, arguing wrongful death. After admitting her mother to the facility in 2010, Puryear visited her almost every day and became concerned when in 2013 she saw that she had what looked like a rash.

Puryear didn't know at the time that the nursing home had had a scabies epidemic, Lourie says.

“[Zeni] had a rash and [the staff] did not recognize that it was scabies. Her daughter tried to get to the bottom of what was happening, "explains Lourie. “The institution knew about the problem that several patients and staff members were having due to scabies, but they hid it. They didn't say anything to the other families."

Officials with the Georgia Department of Public Health were allegedly informed of a scabies epidemic at the facility multiple times (including in 2013 and 2015), but did not conduct a site inspection, USA Today reports. Geriatric hospital records showed unreported cases of scabies in 2014, according to the publication.

"The daughter did everything she could and was continually assured that everything was under control," says Lourie about Puryear. “It was terrible for Pam to see her mother in those conditions and to witness the agony that she suffered at the end of her days. I was angry and horrified."

DSP officials did not immediately respond to People magazine's request for comment.

Lourie explains that Puryear believed that Zeni simply had a rash and only learned that she had scabies in the days leading up to her death. After filing the lawsuit, Lourie relates that the grieving daughter finally discovered everything the staff members knew and was not informed.

"In his last six months of life, he was constantly in pain," Mike Prieto, another family attorney, told the Washington Post. "I was being eaten alive inside."

Days before his death, scab patches had formed on Zeni's skin and one of his hands was almost black.

"There was a conversation in the nursing home with a health service provider about the care that should be taken not to touch Zeni's hand for fear that he might fall," said Stephen Chance, another family lawyer, to USA Today.

In an affidavit, Debi Luther, a Florida nurse who examined Zeni's case, said the establishment failed to recognize Zeni's deteriorating health and prevent the spread of scabies, according to the lawsuit obtained by People magazine.. This, Luther claims, resulted in Zeni's death.

"It's a nightmare," Puryear confessed to the Post. "A total lack of dignity."