'Absolute nightmare': 4 former Florida nursing home staffers charged in 12 Hurricane Irma deaths

Appropriate pre-storm preparations gave way to a chaotic response in a Florida nursing home where suffocating heat resulted in 12 patients dying after Hurricane Irma struck in September 2017.

That’s the scenario presented in a 111-page state report that led to manslaughter charges being filed Tuesday against four of the center’s workers, including its administrator.

And after a two-year investigation, the reckoning may not be over.

Hollywood Police Chief Chris O’Brien said further arrests are expected in a case that drew national outrage upon revelations of near 100-degree temperatures for days at the nursing home after Irma knocked off power to its air conditioning system.

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Despite protestations from lawyers for the facility’s workers, O’Brien said they “neglected their duties’’ by failing to evacuate despite the stifling conditions at The Rehabilitation Center at Hollywood Hills, about 20 miles north of Miami.

Eight of the center’s approximately 150 patients, most of them elderly, died of heat exposure on Sept. 13, 2017, three days after Irma ripped through south Florida with winds of 140-mph and above. Another four died from heat-related causes in the following days and weeks.

The medical examiner ruled the deaths homicides. O’Brien said more than 500 people were interviewed and 55 computers were seized in an investigation that continues.

Jorge Carballo, then the facility’s administrator, and night shift nursing supervisor Sergo Colin face 12 counts of aggravated manslaughter. Nurses Tamika Miller and Althia Meggie were charged with six and two counts of aggravated manslaughter, respectively, as well as evidence tampering.

Carballo and Colin were in jail pending bail late Tuesday, while Meggie was released. Miller was being held in Miami-Dade County pending transfer to Broward County.

“The families sitting here today should not have lost their loved ones this way,’’ O’Brien said at a news conference attended by relatives of the victims. “They placed their faith and trust in the facility … and that trust was betrayed. They have been living an absolute nightmare.”

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Police said evidence collected in their investigation forms the basis for the state report, which paints a picture of a nursing home staff that initially took the right steps to care for its residents – buying extra food and water as well as seven days’ fuel for the generator, renting portable air conditioners and getting information from regulators in statewide conference calls.

Then things went very wrong.

The transformer that powered the central air conditioner stopped working after Irma's arrival, and the system was not connected to the backup generator, which otherwise kept electricity flowing in the two-story building.

Investigators found the first floor’s temporary air conditioners vented into the ceiling, meaning its heat went to the second floor, where 11 of the 12 victims lived.

Carballo and other administrators called the power company and then-Gov. Rick Scott, who had provided nursing homes his cell number. They got no help.

“Nobody came,” said David Frankel, a lawyer who represents Colin. “For three days, these people did everything possible they could to keep everyone stable.’’

Scott, now a U.S. senator, said in a statement the nursing home employees should have called 911.

Early in the afternoon of Sept. 12, Hollywood paramedics made the first of several visits over the next 16 hours: a 93-year-old man had breathing problems. His temperature was measured at 106 degrees and he died five days later.

Carballo told investigators that when he left at 11 p.m. the temperature inside the home was safe. The report found that “not credible.”

The next day, residents started dying.

At 3 a.m. Sept. 13, paramedics returned to treat an elderly woman in cardiac arrest, with one telling investigators the home’s temperature was “ungodly hot.” Her temperature was 107 degrees, as was another patient’s.

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Paramedics also reported evidence that some patients were not being monitored closely – one of them was in rigor mortis, so he had been dead for hours before anyone noticed – and said Colin tried to keep them from checking on others.

Alarmed by the patients arriving at its emergency room, staff from Memorial Hospital across the street went to check. One nurse said the center felt like “the blast of heat” inside a car that’s been sitting in the sun all day.

The fire department ordered the home evacuated and, within days, its license was suspended. State regulators revoked it in January. South Miami’s Larkin Hospital, which owns the center, is appealing the revocation.

Louisiana-based lawyer Jim Cobb, who represents Carballo, said the defendants are being scapegoated even though they confronted a dire situation as the hurricane cut off power to large swaths of Florida, some of them for weeks.

“They have attempted in these charges to blame healthcare workers and caregivers who showed up to work and were at their posts in the middle of a natural disaster emergency and did the very best they could,” Cobb told the Miami Herald.

He also countered the accusation that the nursing home workers failed to take the ailing patients to Memorial Hospital, which was operational, saying that facility was so overwhelmed with patients, it was referring some to The Rehabilitation Center.

“It was a post-hurricane disaster, for crying out loud, not a slow day at the local urgent care clinic,’’ Cobb said.

Contributing: The Associated Press

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Florida nursing home hit by Hurricane Irma: 4 charged in 12 deaths