An article on this tragedy reminds us, "It just really points to the issue of mental health with the elderly." The woman who was complaining that her roommate, Mrs Barrows, was having too many visitors, was known to be demented and paranoid, and the nursing home would not allow the family of the murdered woman to get a room change for their mother. The nursing home bares some of the responsibility for the death. Admittedly, hind site is better at predicting what might happen but there seem to have been many signals here which went unheeded. Nor was the 100 year old monitored protected from the constant verbal harassment from the roommate. Death by strangulation, at any age, is unacceptable.
Her defense lawyer, Carl Levin, said, Ms Lunquist, the 98 year old had a "long-standing diagnosis of dementia as well as issues of cognitive impairment". The staff must have been working off their own set of assumptions, ignoring the data before their faces. Why? Probably as this situation is without a clear precedent having been established. Paranoid, cognitively demented people lose judgment and would be totally unpredictable. The staff listened to this woman complaining. apparently, but the erroneous assumption that an old woman wouldn't do anything as violent as that makes one wonder at what kind of other outrageous, though perhaps non-violent, is tolerated by staff. In many nursing homes staff is not well-paid and many foreign speaking staff who have grown up with entirely different standards of care and little education are the caretakers.
The attacker is being evaluated for competency to stand trial. Both families are left to mourn. For the BBC article, click here.
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