Suit alleges elderly woman sexually assaulted at psychiatric center. ‘No one was there’
In May 2020, a staff member at the Milton-based psychiatric center Telecare walked in on a patient in someone else’s room under suspicious circumstances.
The room belonged to an elderly woman, who only days earlier was admitted into the facility for risk of self-harm and refusal to take medication. The other patient in the room, a 33-year-old man, had a history of institutionalization and incapability to stand trial, court records show.
They slept across the hall from each other.
The man was allegedly standing above the woman and pulling his pants up. The woman’s pants were down, her diaper was ripped and she was crying, according to a recent complaint lodged in Pierce County Superior Court.
The incident is at the center of a civil lawsuit filed March 28 on behalf of the woman, who The News Tribune isn’t naming because she is the alleged victim of a sex crime and, although she’s named in the suit, her attorney said her family requested that she not be identified.
The complaint was filed by the woman’s husband and power of attorney. He claims that his wife was raped on two occasions by a fellow patient at Telecare. It also accuses facility staff of leaving both patients unattended in unlocked rooms and failing to provide basic safeguards to protect the woman in the aftermath of the attacks.
“We cannot comment on allegations made in the complaint, given the pending litigation,” Telecare said in a statement response to a News Tribune inquiry. “Telecare provides the highest standards of care to people who suffer from complex and challenging mental health issues with the mission of helping them recover their health, hopes, and dreams.”
The suspicious incident inside the woman’s room did not lead to criminal charges due to a lack of evidence and inability to prove a criminal case, according to Adam Faber, a spokesperson for the Pierce County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office. Faber said that the woman was non-verbal and couldn’t offer any information about what took place at the time or when detectives followed up.
“The victim was examined at the hospital and potential evidence was collected, but the results came back with no male DNA recovered,” he said in a statement.
Two alleged assaults
The 16-bed Telecare Pierce County Evaluation and Treatment Center, which had operated at Western State Hospital grounds until its lease expired in late 2017, reopened in April 2019 in a new facility in Milton, roughly 7.5 driving miles east of Tacoma.
Milton police were called to the center on May 1, 2020, after an employee reported that, following a bathroom break, she walked into the plaintiff’s room and found the alleged assailant standing over the woman and pulling his pants up, according to police records obtained by The News Tribune in a public records request.
The year prior, the suspect had been involuntarily committed into Western State Hospital after he was deemed mentally incompetent to stand trial in a criminal case in which he was accused of assaulting a bus driver, court records show.
The woman was crying with her pants down and diaper ripped and lying sideways on her mattress, which was on the floor because she was susceptible to falls, according to the employee’s statement to police and an officer’s account. The employee told police that she saw the suspect’s upper pubic or lower navel area.
Officers attempted to speak with the woman but she was difficult to understand and possibly speaking German, police records show. They interviewed the suspect in his room across the hall, where he told police that he had sex with the woman because she had “shot him in the head” that she wanted to have sex. Surveillance video reviewed by officers showed the suspect look down the hallway, enter the plaintiff’s unlocked room and close the door while the employee was on break.
The woman was taken to a nearby hospital, where a Sexual Assault Nurse Examination Kit, or rape kit, was performed and a diagnosis of vaginal and anal sexual assault was made, the suit claimed.
“The young, mentally ill, alleged rapist was never arrested, never charged. This, despite being caught in the act,” attorney Tom Balerud, who is representing the plaintiff, told The News Tribune. “I was hired to help make sure this awful event does not get swept away just because the victim is too elderly, too vulnerable, to demand justice herself.”
An officer noted in his report that the case would be forwarded to the Prosecuting Attorney’s Office for review of a rape charge against the suspect. A few days after the attack, a social worker called an officer and conveyed that the woman was “extremely jumpy and shaking” and unable to verbalize anything, police records show. During a follow-up interview with police on May 8, 2020, the plaintiff was more talkative, although an officer noted she appeared to struggle with short-term memory.
“When asked about what happened in her room a week ago, she said she felt pain in her vagina like she’s never felt before and also in her stomach,” the officer’s report said. “She went on to say that she thought somebody raped her because she was hurting so much.”
But she couldn’t identify the suspect, the report said, although she mentioned that a male patient in his 30s would stop by her room to say hello and he’d check her blood sugar.
The lawsuit claimed that the plaintiff had been assaulted by the suspect before, “almost immediately” after she was admitted into the center, and that a registered nurse at Telecare told police as much during the investigation into the May 1, 2020, incident. The plaintiff reportedly had complained that her vaginal area hurt and she was taken to a hospital, but no rape kit was performed during that hospital visit because Telecare staff did not inform the hospital of the alleged attack, according to the suit.
Telecare staff told police investigating the May 1, 2020, incident, that they would be working on finding a new facility for either one or both patients, police records show. Telecare is accused of not moving the woman or her alleged abuser further apart from each other despite the alleged assaults or relocating the woman to another facility entirely.
The woman, then 73, was discharged on May 15, 2020, after staying less than three weeks at the center. The complaint alleges negligence and abuse of a vulnerable adult and seeks unspecified damages and attorney fees.
“We spend our whole adult lives looking after others, at least my client did,” Balerud said. “And, according to what I’ve read, when this loving wife, dutiful mother, finally needs to be helped herself, no one was there.”
This story was originally published April 4, 2023 at 11:54 AM.
