COLLIERVILLE, Tenn. — A woman contacted police about suspected abuse after her 63-year-old mother was rushed to the hospital overnight from a nursing home with a history of problems.
Raven Bernard says she got a call from the hospital around 3 a.m. Tuesday saying her 63-year-old mother had been transported from Poplar Oaks nursing home in Collierville.
“Looks like a black eye, like somebody just punched her in the eye,” Bernard said, describing what her mother looked like. “And now it’s infected and stuff and she can’t open it. So I’m like, it’s like real bad.”
But what Bernard says she found strange was this message left by the nursing home roughly an hour before, saying the situation was not an emergency.
That didn’t make sense to Bernard since her mother wound up in the ER, and later, admitted to Methodist Germantown.
She says the person who called from Poplar Oaks didn’t leave a name, and she couldn’t reach anyone for hours. Once she did, Bernard says the nursing home staff said her mom had a seizure.
“She hit her head on the rail and that’s how she ended up with the bruises,” Bernard said she was told. “But when I talk to everybody else, the nurses or whatever, they’re saying that it looks like the bruises are a day old.”
Bernard says it didn’t all add up, so they reached out to Collierville police about concerns of possible abuse and neglect.
“Somebody did come over and took the report and everything and he said he’d get back with us in three to four days.”
Bernard’s complaints about her mother’s care, along with the abuse allegations, aren’t the first ones WREG has investigated at Poplar Oaks.
Hazel Smith also turned to law enforcement regarding her mother’s care at Poplar Oaks, sharing her story this past summer.
“She would tell me they would cuss her out, they would hit her and yank her,” Smith said her mother told her.
Poplar Oaks is a one-star rated nursing home and was hit with an $11,000 fine in 2017 after regulators found, among many things, the nursing home didn’t properly report abuse allegations after a resident turned up with a fractured ankle.
Bernard says this recent incident is one of many for her mom, who has a history of seizures but has never suffered injuries.
“She`s got bed sores … When we come in sometimes, she don`t have no clothes on.”
An employee at Poplar Oaks said an administrator wasn’t available.
We reached out to the nursing home’s corporate office and are waiting to hear back, and we’re also waiting to get a copy of the report from Collierville police.