When 83-year-old Mary McCaughan died in an Austin nursing home of Alzheimer’s in 2017, her belongings included clothing and shoes worth $200. She had no home, no car, no retirement, no stocks or bonds, no jewelry nor family heirlooms. Her bank account contained roughly $104,000 from a court settlement she’d recently won against a nursing home, Windsor Nursing and Rehabilitation Center of Duval, where she was abused by a nurse’s aide who posted degrading photos and videos of her on social media.
The nursing home had hired that aide despite a history of arrests for fraud and criminal mischief, court records show. Mary was unable to clean herself or use the bathroom in the final stages of her illness. The aide took photographs of her unclothed. Then he started posting videos that appeared online in 2017.
“He was taking videos of her while she’s sitting there in her own, you know, excrement. She had some of it on her hand. In the video, he’s trying to get her to wipe it on her face, so he takes a feather and touches her lip, so she wipes [it] across her mouth,” said her son, Chandler McCaughan, who later filed a million-dollar lawsuit against Regency Integrated Health Services LLC, the owners of the Windsor nursing home. The lawsuit blames the company’s negligence for his mother’s mistreatment.
