Nurse’s aide convicted of elder abuse

By Jeff Lehr

jlehr@joplinglobe.com

Jurors returned a guilty verdict Thursday in the trial of a former nurse assistant at a Carthage nursing home who was accused of striking a disabled resident in the groin and forcing water down his nose into his lungs through his oxygen tubing.

Dennis A. Rowe, 39, was convicted of second-degree elder abuse in a single-day trial in Jasper County Circuit Court in Joplin.

The case boiled down to the allegation of another former nurse assistant at the Carthage Health and Rehabilitation Center, Michael L. Wells Jr., 30, against the defendant’s denial. Wells turned Rowe in two years ago, alleging that he assaulted Benny Crowley, a brain-injured resident of the home in his mid-30s who was confined to a wheelchair, on oxygen much of the time and unable to care for himself.

Witness’s account

Wells testified for the prosecution that he and Rowe on April 14, 2007, were in Crowley’s room at the home when Wells asked Rowe how he and another man who had worked there in the past managed to “handle” Crowley as well as they did. Wells explained that Crowley posed control issues for most staff members from time to time.

He said Rowe responded to his question by walking up to Crowley, who was reclining at an angle in his wheelchair, and hitting him in his testicles. The blow caused Crowley to cry out, Wells said.

“It was the kind of cry when you get the wind knocked out of you,” Wells told the court.

He said Rowe then began smacking Crowley in the face while mockingly and repeatedly asking him: “Who did this to you?”

Confused by what was happening, Crowley answered that his roommate at the home had done it, Wells said. He said Rowe then grabbed the water canister that was hooked up to Crowley’s oxygen concentrator and held it up so that water was forced down the tubing, up the resident’s nose and into his lungs.

“Benny started choking, with the water forcibly coming out of his mouth and nose,” Wells said.

He said Rowe then started laughing and asked him if he was going to tell anybody what he had done. Wells said he raised Crowley up in his chair and leaned him forward to help get the water out of his lungs. He acknowledged that he did not immediately inform anyone of the abuse.

“I really didn’t know what to do,” he said. “I’d never seen anything like that.”

Wells said he went home and told his wife and mother what happened, and they persuaded him to call the home’s administrator the next day and inform her of the abuse. The matter was referred to the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services, and an investigation was launched that led to a filing of the charge against Rowe almost a year later.

Wells testified that he was “written up” for not reporting the matter immediately and was suspended while the state investigated the incident.

Allegations denied

Rowe took the witness stand in his own defense and denied the allegation, telling the court that Wells invented the abuse as a way of getting back at Rowe for spurning his sexual advances.

He said Wells did not generally work the same shift he did at the home. But, on the day in question, they were both working the day shift, and they had taken Crowley and his roommate back to their room after lunch. He said Crowley was left in his wheelchair in front of a television set in the room. He was not even hooked up to the oxygen at the time because he normally went without it when he was not lying down, Rowe said.

“Did you assault Mr. Crowley?” defense attorney Cary Selsor asked Rowe.

“No, sir,” Rowe replied.

“Did you pour water down his nose?”

“No, sir.”

Asked why Wells might invent such a story, Rowe said that Wells had surreptitiously obtained his cell-phone number through Rowe’s girlfriend, who worked in housekeeping at the nursing home, and had sent him three text messages of a sexually forward nature.

He told the court that the first text was: “I love you.” Rowe said he simply ignored it. Then Wells text-messaged him the song “Secret Lover,” he said.

“The third message was asking that I do an act of porn on him,” Rowe told the court.

Rowe’s girlfriend, Shelly Perez, was called as a witness by the defense to back up the defendant’s account of the text messages. She said she had given Wells her cell phone temporarily to transfer a song to it, and he apparently had obtained Rowe’s phone number from it.

Perez told the court that she saw each of the three text messages that Wells sent her boyfriend. She told the court that Rowe confronted Wells after the third message and “a couple days” before the alleged assault on Crowley.

“He said, ‘I’m not that way, and I really wish you would stop texting me,’” Perez testified.

Wells denied any sexual interest in Rowe on cross-examination by Selsor. He said he text-messaged him the song “Secret Lover” because it was being passed around among employees at the nursing home. He said that if he sent any other text messages of the nature Rowe described, they were only “joking” communications.

Closing arguments

Assistant Prosecutor Jeremy Crowley (no relation to the victim) told the jury in closing arguments that Rowe’s defense that Wells was lying because Rowe had spurned his advances was “absurd.”

“Why would he concoct a story that was going to get him in trouble and potentially cost him his job as well?” Crowley asked.

He said Wells had nothing to gain by lying.

“If Mr. Rowe did what Mr. Wells said, Mr. Rowe is a heinous person,” Selsor told jurors in his closing argument. “But that’s just what Mr. Wells said.”

Selsor argued that the prosecution had failed to offer any corroborating evidence of Wells’ allegation. Crowley’s doctor testified that he did not see any bruising or other evidence of a blow to the groin when he examined him about a week later. An investigator with the Department of Health and Senior Services acknowledged on the witness stand that his investigation did not begin until about nine months later, and that he was unable to locate Rowe to get his side of the story.

But the doctor also had said that a blow to the victim’s groin would not necessarily have produced bruising since he was overweight from inactivity because of his medical condition and has considerable fatty tissue.

The prosecutor’s office did not call either the victim or his roommate as witnesses because of difficulties they have both with memory and communication. But the prosecution did call Deb Haws, administrator of the home at the time of the incident. She told the court that she had asked the victim about the alleged incident, and that he had responded in a manner that seemed to her to indicate that something had happened.

Haws also testified that after Rowe left the employment of the home, Crowley’s condition seemed to improve.

Jurors deliberated 90 minutes before returning the guilty verdict. Rowe dropped his head into his hands as the verdict was read by Circuit Judge Gayle Crane.

Second-degree elder abuse is a Class B felony in Missouri, punishable by five to 15 years in prison. The judge ordered the completion of a sentencing-assessment report and set Rowe’s sentencing hearing for Aug. 10.





Disqualified



Dennis Rowe told jurors Thursday that he has not been allowed to work as a nurse assistant since an abuse allegation arose two years ago. He has been working instead as an employee of an area casino.

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