'He Choked Me:' Why Some Elderly Attacks Go Unnoticed

March 7, 2002 — -- Helen Love, a 75-year-old grandmother of three, looked into the video camera and told of being severely beaten by a nursing home caregiver who discovered she had soiled herself.

"He choked me and he went and broke my neck," said Love, who had to wear a metal halo in the videotaped deposition from July 1998. "He broke my wrist bones, in my hand. He put his hand over my mouth."

Two days later, Love died.

Nursing home officials did not report her beating to a state official who was at the nursing home at the time. Ultimately, though, Love's attacker served a year in prison. An investigation revealed that he had been fired by two previous nursing homes for aggressive behavior.

On Monday, the Senate Select Committee on Aging saw Love's deposition and got the results of a General Accounting Office report on elder abuse. An 18-month review of three states with high nursing home populations suggested that cases like Love's may be more common. The report found that many nursing home abuse cases are not immediately reported to law enforcement officials.

The GAO report found that 50 percent of abuse reports from nursing homes came at least two or more days after caregivers first learned about allegations. The delay hampered gathering evidence and made prosecuting the cases difficult.

But some experts suggest the problem could be worse.

"The biggest problem is that these people are hidden. There is very little traffic going into these [nursing] homes from relatives of these victims or people who could observe what's going on," said Sara Aravanis, director of the National Center on Elder Abuse.

A 1996 report by the National Center on Elder Abuse estimated that unreported cases of elder abuse outnumber reported cases by a ratio of 5-to-1. According to the Senate Special Committee on Aging, which held a hearing into the issue Monday, more nursing homes are being cited for abuse. From 1999 to 2000, the number of cases rose as much as 20 percent.