ST. LOUIS — After more than three weeks missing, a former resident of Northview Village Nursing Home was found Tuesday morning about a mile away, authorities said.
Northview Village shut down without warning to residents or staff on Dec. 15. As workers scrambled to prepare residents for transfer to other facilities, and employees from other nursing homes arrived to take them, one resident, Frederick Caruthers, 61, walked away from the building.
Four days later, the nursing home’s former employees saw him walking near Kingshighway Boulevard and Natural Bridge Avenue and raised the alarm. Caruthers had been diagnosed with schizophrenia and was without needed medication.
The Missouri State Highway Patrol said Tuesday that Caruthers was found at a local restaurant. A member of the public saw him and phoned the police.
Sergeant Charles Wall, of the ºüÀêÊÓƵ police department, said the officers received a call Tuesday at around 10 a.m. that Caruthers had been spotted on the 4900 block of Natural Bridge Avenue — about a mile north of the shuttered nursing home.
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When officers located him, Caruthers had no obvious signs of injury, according to Wall. He was taken to an area hospital for evaluation.
The chaotic closure of Northview Village Nursing Home has prompted rebukes from area officials. The facility’s 175 residents were abruptly transferred to more than a dozen different nursing homes in the area, and in many cases, family members were not notified, and did not find out where their loved ones had been moved until days later. The facility’s roughly 170 employees were left jobless, and on Monday a group protested outside the owners’ offices, saying they had still not been paid for their last week of work, or for their accrued paid time off.
U.S. Rep. Cori Bush, D-ºüÀêÊÓƵ, on Monday called for the U.S. Health and Human Services Department to investigate the facility’s owners, and the state’s system for oversight of nursing homes.