SOUTHAVEN, Miss. — A Southaven woman wants someone to be held accountable for a snake showing up in her mother’s nursing home room.
Her mom has dementia and didn’t know anything about it, but she said she got a hold of photo evidence.
The nursing home disputes the account, saying the snake only slithered through the hallway.
Mary Robins’s mother Bettie has been in Diversicare of Southaven for four years.
She picked the facility because it’s close to home and she can visit almost every day.
“There has been a few challenges and they’ve been corrected more or less. But’s been an ongoing issue with the administration,” Robins said.
The latest issue included a snake in her mom’s room, she said.
“I was totally shocked, because I’m afraid of snakes. Had my mother been in her right mind, she could’ve had a heart attack,” Robins said.
WREG went to Diversicare to ask managers about it, but were turned away.
Instead, the nursing home sent us a statement saying in part, “a snake was found in a hallway at Diversicare of Southaven. It was not in close proximity to any resident or patient residing at our center.”
They said they called 911 and had the non-venomous rat snake removed.
But Robins said the tiling around the snake proved it was in her mom’s room and management told her a different story.
“He said it was in her room, but it was only in her room because it was chased in her room,” she said of Diversicare management.
According to state records, the Mississippi Department of Health investigated Diversicare in 2017 and found they were non-compliant with licensure regulations.
The state said the facility did not report an incident where they found a patient crawling on the floor with bruising on her face. Caretakers didn’t know where where the bruising came from.
That type of deception frustrated Robins.
“The right thing is when anything happens to a family member they should contact that person’s family. Let them know what happened and work from there,” she said.
She says she’s not moving her mom, but hoped the managers changed their ways.
Diversicicare officials said they had not confirmed the snake in the photos was the one present in their facility.
They said while it’s never pleasant to find a snake in a home or business, it does happen from time to time in the Southaven area.