A 25-year-old Florida home health aide has been charged with manslaughter after she failed to call 911 when the 86-year-old man in her care fell out of bed and she didn’t help him or call 911 for hours.
An affidavit says that Beatrice Taylor arrived at the home for her shift at 9 p.m. and promptly fell asleep on the living room couch, the Polk County Sheriff’s Office said. A “thump” from the victim’s bedroom woke her up at 1 a.m. She told detectives she went to check on him and found him wedged between the nightstand and the bed, but he told her not to touch him so she left him there.
Sometime between 3:45 and 4:53, Taylor awoke again and called her parents on the phone. While still speaking with her parents, she checked on the victim and found him in the same place between the bed and nightstand, but now he was unresponsive. Her parents told her to call 911, but she called her employer, Assisting Hands, first, and left a message. She called 911 shortly after 5:30 a.m.
The sheriff’s office said Taylor violated multiple company policies, notably by not calling 911 when the patient had fallen out of bed and by sleeping while on shift.
The sheriff’s office said the victim’s family had hired round the clock care from Assisting Hands for the man after his release from the hospital, where he was diagnosed with congestive heart failure. The care consisted of two 12-hours shifts. When Taylor arrived to start her shift, the day shift aide told her the man and his wife were ready for bed but had not yet gone to sleep. She went to sleep immediately after the day shift worker left.
An autopsy determined that the victim had an implanted pacemaker that showed he was alive at 1 a.m. and that if Taylor had called 911 at that time, as required by her company policy, he would not have died.
When paramedics arrived after Taylor called 911, one of them overheard her tell someone on the phone, “He was old anyway so what does it matter?”
Assisting Hands told investigators that Taylor had worked for them for about 8 months and that she didn’t come to work the day after the incident so she was fired.
Taylor has been charged last week with aggravated manslaughter of an elderly person.
