Former employees speak out after 89-year-old woman disappeared from care facility, then died

COBB COUNTY, Ga. — An 89-year-old woman died after she disappeared from the facility that was supposed to keep her safe.

Channel 2′s Cobb County Bureau Chief Michele Newell learned this isn’t the first time a resident has disappeared from the facility in Marietta.

Retired law enforcement official David Lee remembers responding to a similar situation in the late 1990s.

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“We had received a report of a missing elderly lady who had walked off,” Lee said.

Lee worked for the Marietta Police Department when he and his team searched for a woman who disappeared from the Greenwood Place Assisted Living and Memory Care facility on Whitlock Avenue.

“When it happened, the lady fell down a small hill, 15 feet down to the bottom and we found her in some bushes in there. Unlike this last incident, we were lucky to find her alive,” Lee said.

Police reports reveal more than a dozen investigations at the facility over the past four years.

Of those, two arrests were made for two different alleged crimes which include larceny and assault.

“I didn’t think the care was at the level I was told it would be at,” Anthony Argano, who removed his dad from the facility, said. Argano said he pulled his dad out of the facility after staff forgot to turn his dad’s oxygen tank on, which he said resulted in a trip to the hospital and eventually a stay in hospice.

Argano said his dad recovered.

Two former employees who don’t want to be identified out of fear of retaliation spoke exclusively to Newell.

They said they quit their jobs because they were tired of witnessing neglect. “I just could not take seeing the neglect,” one of them said.

“(They were) short-staffed real bad. The cleanliness of the building, it was horrible.”

A former dining director said she often found residents wandering from the memory care unit even though she says it’s supposed to be secure.

“Even though I was in dining, I would take residents to their rooms because they were so short-staffed,” she said.

She recalled incidents of alleged neglect against one resident, saying, “They just continued to yell and he did fall out of the chair and he was on the floor 30 minutes before anyone got him up.”

Newell tried to reach the facility’s management numerous times but hasn’t received a response regarding the allegations.

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