The family was concerned that Elizabeth might become a target for predators. She is 46 years old and has early-onset dementia. “She has the mental capacity of a two-year-old,” her ex-husband, Manuel, told WFAA.
Several months ago, the family installed a picture frame with a hidden camera in Elizabeth’s room at Westpark Rehabilitation and Living Center in Euless.
They framed an old photo of Manuel and their two children.
“Because she’s young I knew that she would be a target,” Manuel recounted. I was hoping to be wrong, but it turned out that I was correct.
Manuel’s daughter constantly monitored the camera footage.
On July 22, she witnessed what she assumed to be a female nursing home staff sexually assaulting her mother the day before. She informed her brother and father.
“She couldn’t believe what she saw,” Manuel explained.
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Police have secured an arrest warrant charging the nursing home staff with aggravated sexual assault.
“This is like somebody victimized my two-year-old,” Manuel told me. “I’ve seen it completely once. It’s simply too hard. It simply enrages me.” Despite many attempts to comment, the care home did not respond.
The family’s attorney gave WFAA the footage.
It shows the employee undressing Elizabeth and getting ready to change her diaper.
“Stand up,” she instructs Elizabeth. “Stand up.” She walks her to the bed, places her in it, and starts changing her.
What follows is what police describe as a sexual assault. It continues for several minutes. She then puts the diaper on Elizabeth and covers her with a blanket.
“When you watch the video, there’s not much doubt,” said the family’s attorney, David Crowe. “It’s one of the worst that we’ve seen.”
Manuel, a long-haul truck driver, said he was out of state when his children informed him about the video. He went to the nursing home in his pickup.
He claims he went to the care home, got Elizabeth, and then went to the administrator’s office.
“I closed the door and called the law,” he told me.
He claims that patrol police responded, watched the footage, and promptly called for a detective. He claims officials took Elizabeth to John Peter Smith Hospital for a sexual assault examination.
“They were really on top of their job,” he stated of the officers.
Manuel claims that the nursing home originally refused to give police the employee’s identity and informed them that they would have to subpoena it. He stated that the next day, the detective informed him that the nursing facility had opted to provide police with the employee’s name.
Crowe, the family’s attorney, claims that under Texas law, the family’s maximum recovery in a lawsuit is $250,000. That is the limit for noneconomic damages.
“It limits the exposure to nursing homes, which does not encourage the best of care in Texas nursing homes,” according to Crowe.
Manuel, his daughter, son, and daughter-in-law are now caring for Elizabeth. They’ve set up a GoFundMe page to try to generate money to cover bills.
He claims that he and his children are not adequately able to care for Elizabeth, yet they cannot bring themselves to place her in another nursing home.
“I don’t know how anybody could ever trust anybody again,” he told me.
Elizabeth’s family is working to acquire in-home health care for her.
He feels Elizabeth understands that something horrible has occurred to her. He claims she now complains when he changes or showers her.
“She wasn’t like that before,” he explained.
When Manuel talks about Elizabeth, he reminisces about how they met at 17.
“I was just cruising by her high school, and I saw her out there and it thought she was beautiful and it just went from there,” according to him. “A year later, we already had a kid.”
A year later, their son was born. Their daughter quickly followed.
“I wish I could go back to that time,” he says, sighing.
They have been married for over twenty years. She worked as a school bus driver. Elizabeth began to show signs of dementia in her early forties.
Elizabeth and many of her family members suffer early-onset Alzheimer’s because they carry the Jalisco mutation. People who contain the gene, which was discovered in 2006, are descended from a common ancestor in the Mexican state of Jalisco.
“Even though she’s right here, we don’t have her anymore,” says Manuel. “I love her. I care for her as if she were my two-year-old.”
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On one recent day, Elizabeth sat in a chair, cuddling her baby doll. She enjoys the Happy Birthday song.
He’d purchased her a birthday cake.
“Every day is her birthday,” he explains.
He sat at the kitchen table. He lighted the birthday candles and served her cake and biscuits.
“She’s going downhill pretty fast,” he admits, taking a long breath. “It is hard. It’s pretty difficult.”
Elizabeth is the love of his life, and he intends to spend every remaining day with her.