ST. LOUIS — After almost a week of searching, advocates and state officials said Thursday that they have located all but one resident transferred out of a north ºüÀêÊÓƵ nursing home that abruptly closed over the weekend.
Marjorie Moore, executive director of the region’s nursing home ombudsman program, said her organization, VOYCE, began going to each of the 14 facilities, to confirm each resident’s new placement, provide resources and get contact information for family members, some of whom didn’t know where their relatives had ended up.
“A lot of the residents didn’t have phones,†Moore said. “They left with nothing.â€
The ºüÀêÊÓƵ Police Department’s Missing Persons Unit “is aware†of the final missing resident, said Lisa Cox, spokeswoman for the state’s Department of Health and Senior Services. It was not immediately clear why that resident wasn’t transferred to a home.
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The abrupt closure of the Northview Village Nursing Home, on North Kingshighway at Highland Avenue, left workers unpaid and some families unable to locate loved ones. About 175 residents were moved over the weekend, sometimes without informing their families.
One of Northview’s owners, Makhlouf “Mark†Suissa, said Thursday that the state wasn’t paying enough to keep the facility afloat. And he accused staff of walking out last week when they didn’t get paid, an accusation workers say is untrue.
But, yes, he said, he would have conducted the closure differently if he could have.
“Of course I would have done it a different way,†he said. “I have other partners also involved. But unfortunately that’s the way it happened.â€
Northview’s woes were exacerbated, first, during the COVID-19 pandemic, when it began to lose staff. Then, as resident numbers declined, the home lost a special $1 million annual Medicaid payment.
When paychecks didn’t arrive Friday morning for Northview workers, they suspected something was wrong.
Starting around 4 p.m. that afternoon, vans from other area nursing homes began taking residents to other facilities.
That included Levare Westbrook’s mother, Dorothy, 82, who has dementia. He said he didn’t know where she was for more than two days.
“I was pissed off,†he said on Thursday. “I did a whole lot of cursing until I finally found her.â€
Though he’s listed as an emergency contact for his mother, nursing home staff didn’t call him. He found out from his brother, who found out about the closure from a friend who had seen it in the news.
“I didn’t even know it until my brother called me Saturday night,†Westbrook said.
His son had borrowed his car, so he couldn’t get to the nursing home until Sunday night. When he got there, firefighters were closing up the doors. And no one could tell him where his mother had gone.
He called police Monday morning, and they gave him a list of more than a dozen phone numbers to try.
“I went down the list and went down the list, and late Monday night, I finally found her,†Westbrook said.
His mom had been taken to a nursing home in south ºüÀêÊÓƵ, and she was her usual outgoing self, he said. She taught children with severe disabilities in ºüÀêÊÓƵ for almost 30 years before retiring and later developing dementia.
She hadn’t realized she had been transported to a new nursing home over the weekend.
But all her belongings were left at Northview, including clothes and family pictures.
“She deserves better,†said her other son, Keith Westbrook of Baltimore.
He said now he and his brother have to evaluate whether they want to keep their mother at the new home.
“The concern now is, is it a good facility and is she happy where she is?†he said.
Other relatives, however, were still hunting for loved ones on Thursday.
Alvin Cooper of East ºüÀêÊÓƵ said his son, 35, has been in rehabilitative care for nearly a year, recovering from a gunshot wound to the head and a substance use disorder.
His son has a court-appointed guardian, but Cooper said he still has the right to visit.
“They figured he don’t have nobody that cared about him and they thought they could move him around,†Cooper said.
“I just want some justice for my son.â€
Still, Moore, from VOYCE, said her agency is getting fewer phone calls, now, from family members still searching.
And some families, she said, are starting the process of transferring their relatives to facilities of their own choosing.