The family of an 87-year-old man who had been in the Riverbend Post Acute Rehabilitation for just a month before the it was ravaged by the coronavirus has filed a lawsuit against the facility.
Okey Long of Kansas City, Kansas, died on April 17, after COVID-19 took hold in the facility. So far, Long and another 26 people have died there. Long was in a “frail, defenseless, and dependent condition,” and Riverbend failed to protect him, the lawsuit alleges.
Long’s widow, Addie Bush Long, and adult daughter, Latrice Newman, claim that Riverbend should have been protecting its residents and staff before March 31 by monitoring them for fever, cough and other COVID-19 symptoms.
The first positive case was reported to the Unified Government’s Public Health Department on April 1. Officials have said they believe it was brought into Riverbend by a staff worker.
Riverbend failed to tell Long’s family about the outbreak, which they learned from the news, the lawsuit said. Riverbend also failed to follow proper infection control protocols, to ensure its workers weren’t sick, to provide proper personal protective equipment and to separate the residents who were COVID-19 positive from the rest of the residents, the lawsuit alleges.
The family’s attorney, Rachel Stahle, said Long had suffered a seizure and went into Riverbend in February hoping for rehabilitation and a quick recovery.
“From what the family understood, he was getting better,” she said. “They were expecting that he would be coming home.”
Cory Schulte, Riverbend’s executive director, declined to comment on the lawsuit.
“Due to the recent public discussion of potential litigation against Riverbend, I think it prudent for me to discontinue responding to media requests,” he said.
The lawsuit also names Riverbend’s parent company, Big Blue Healthcare, Inc., which is owned by The Ensign Group, Inc., a Southern California company that owns more than 250 assisted living, skilled nursing and rehabilitative care facilities in the U.S.
“There’s a lot of corporate failures that go into these types of situations,” Stahle said. “So that’s what the case is really about: the corporate failures that lead to this and how do we ensure that something like this never happens again.”
As of Thursday, 94 Riverbend residents and 25 staff members had tested positive for the coronavirus.
