A 77-year-old woman died last year after she repeatedly fell and remained on the ground for hours without help inside her home at a Northglenn assisted living facility, a lawsuit filed Tuesday alleges.
Staff at Northglenn Heights Assisted Living and Memory Care Community were supposed to check on Kathleen Griffin every two hours but failed to do so on four different occasions when Griffin fell and could not get up in February 2024, leaving her stranded on the ground for between three and seven hours after each fall, according to the lawsuit.
Those falls and the extended time spent on the ground led to Griffin’s hospitalization for dehydration and traumatic rhabdomyolysis, a condition in which a person’s muscles break down after an injury, according to the lawsuit brought by Griffin’s daughter, Maura North.
Griffin fell again on July 2, 2024, while in hospice care. She broke her hip in that fall and did not receive help for about five hours, despite “crying out” for help, according to the lawsuit. She died 10 days later from complications from those injuries, the lawsuit alleges.
North was the first to discover her mother’s first four falls — through a remote video feed — and alerted staff that her mother needed help. She alleges in the lawsuit that leadership at the assisted living facility failed to properly train staff on how to care for elderly residents and “prioritize(d) revenue, profits and financial gain to the detriment of its patients.”
The executive director at Northglenn Heights Assisted Living and Memory Care directed The Denver Post to the facility’s corporate management for comment Tuesday. Two management companies, Tarantino Properties and HMP Senior Solutions Northglenn Heights, are both named as defendants in the lawsuit. Messages left with the companies were not immediately returned Tuesday.
North’s attorney, Jason Jordan, on Tuesday called for a criminal investigation into the assisted living facility, asking 17th Judicial District Attorney Brian Mason to look into whether the management companies for the 172-bed facility on Pearl Street violated state laws aimed at protecting seniors from abuse and neglect.
Two of Griffin’s caregivers were fired after her death, according to the lawsuit, and both were criminally charged with neglect of an at-risk individual, a misdemeanor.
The caregivers’ criminal cases were apparently later sealed, which means they cannot be publicly accessed and court staff are prohibited sharing information on the cases outcomes and from acknowledging the cases ever existed. Records kept by the Colorado Bureau of Investigation show that the charge against at least one caregiver was dismissed by prosecutors.
Chris Hopper, a spokesman for the district attorney’s office, did not immediately comment Tuesday.
The Colorado Department of Health and Environment has cited Northglenn Heights Assisted Living and Memory Care Community for regulatory violations 17 times over the past two years, finding, among other issues, that some residents lived in unsanitary, cluttered and unsafe units and that staff were not properly trained on fire evacuation procedures, state records show.
The facility was cited in March 2024 for failing to properly train staff on how to help residents who frequently fall, the records show. Regulators found that one man fell eight times between December 2023 and early March 2024, and that staff were not trained on how to specifically care for the man to mitigate his falls.
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