Father defends teen charged in nursing home abuse case

[Doughboy71]

Source: Star Tribune

The father of one of the southern Minnesota teenagers charged with sexually humiliating and abusing numerous vulnerable nursing home residents said in a nationally televised statement today that some of the allegations against his daughter are not "as they appear" and "have been distorted" in news accounts.

The statement was issued to NBC-TV's "Today" show by Michael Larson, father of 18-year-old nursing home aide Ashton M. Larson. The comments are the first made by anyone connected to the eight teenage girls who worked at the Good Samaritan Society nursing home, where the abuse is alleged to have happened for several months early this year, and implicated in the case.

Read more: http://www.startribune.com/local/35533644.html?elr=KArksLckD8EQDUoaEyqyP4O:DW3ckUiD3aPc:_Yyc:aULPQL7PQLanchO7DiUr

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I think someone is either dillusional or hoping the families of the victims don't sue him back to the stone age. How can he honestly say she was doing her job?

[Vanje]

1. Daddie's little Princess

....is a sadist
and a predator

After her jail term, society should be protected from her, by her being registered as a sex offender, and her photo and whereabouts published for her lifetime

[catnhatnh]

14. Bingo

...This is a true twisted sex monster. No normal sex drive points to people 60 years your senior. This is about power and sexual sadism and is more normally found in the history of the death camp kinks of the Third Reich. Yep...every day of her life-she is a true sub-human.

[madrchsod]

2. i have no idea what the truth is...but

who ever were those girls supervisors was`t paying any attention to what was going on. the girls can live with their shame but the nursing home needs a through cleaning of the rest of the staff and management. actually the owners of the nursing home needs to be sued and put out of business.

[uppityperson]

6. One of the difficulties working in nursing homes is everyone is overworked, difficult to supervise

adequately. I am not saying this is ok as it is very much not, and a big reason I gave up working nursing homes. Staff in many places is pushed to its limits, nurses end up passing meds and doing treatments and paperwork and have little time to directly supervise or provide much of decent quality of life care.

From OP's link:
"According to the criminal complaint, Ashton Larson admitted to police that she inserted her finger into a resident's rectum. She said she was trying to trigger a bowel movement but acknowledged that this was not part of her training."

This is not part of a NA's (nurse assistant/aka aid) training, and is not their job or responsibility to do. Yes, as a nurse I have done this, and in no way would ask or expect a CNA to do it as this is not within their scope of practice or training.

NA's who worked with me who were decent and truly wanting to work liked me because I would listen to them, unlike a few other nurses who thought them below them. NA's spend their time in direct patient contact and are a necessary part of the team. Those who abuse patients should be prosecuted.

I agree that there needs to be an investigation, as there needs to be in many nursing homes.

[mduffy31]

16. It is absolutely not their job to provide "digital stimulation"

When I worked in a nursing home for 10 minutes I had one CNA suspended because she was performing duties that she was not qualified, or authorized to do so. I let it go the first time but told her that I wouldn't let it go a second. She felt because I was younger than her that she knew better so she didn't listen to me. When I went to the administration I told them I was not comfortable being legally responsible for a patient when my support staff would not follow direction and work within their scope of practice. Needless to say things were tense between me and her from then on, but I didn't care. I was responsible for them so I had to do what I felt was necessary.

[Tandalayo_Scheisskopf]

3. I am gonna play a little Devil's Advocate here...

And at the same time, Constitutional Law advocate.

In her last year of life, my mother was suffering from dementia. As such, she was clearly and profoundly delusional. Some of the things she reported had no basis in any normative reality. Now, take that sort of situation, and put it in a nursing home setting, where the consumers talk amongst themselves. And plot. And commisurate. I have seen and heard it myself, during the odyssey of that year. Remember: a good number of people who suffer from dementia get mean. Real mean. Nasty. Another thing I saw was that they especially focus that meanness and nastyness at the young. A mechanism of pining for lost youth? Perhaps. Suffice to say that people suffering from dementia and Alzheimers are not reliable reporters of objective facts. It is sad, but inescapable.

Furthermore, these two young women have simply been charged. They have not been convicted. As such as they are presumed innocent of charges, under the law, until convicted by 12 good men and women true.

I have a real problem with these kinds of sensational stories, because people tend to jump to the assumption that those charged are immediately guilty. I saw it around here with three men who were maliciously charged with child abuse by the county prosecutor's office. Their lives were ruined by manifold leaks from the prosecutors, gossip, being found guilty in the court of public opinion and just plain meanness. One moved away and changed his name, citing that his life was forever ruined. Another was harassed for over a year and his 9 year old daughter was harassed and interviewed by the prosecutors a total of 9 times, reporting each time there was no abuse. The little girl was a rock. The prosecutors finally charged and convicted him on something completely unrelated. He is suing and could well end up owning the county, along with his high-powered NYC lawyer, who is working on a contingency basis. The untold story in all this is that the prosecutor's sex crimes unit was broken up and either let go or moved into far more mundane positions, quite quietly and without fanfare.

All three were acquitted of the original charges. All three pay the price of those charges today.

In closing: we are all innocent until proven guilty and that is, perhaps, the bedrock constitutional right. Don't denegrate that right. It may some day prove to be your salvation.

[Lautremont]

4. You mean you don't want to have them immediately killed without trial

like so many of the "progressives" here do? Where's your spine, woman!

(Sarcasm, if it needed to be said.)

[proud progressive]

8. CAREFUL THERE, LAUTREMONT!

the moderator poopoo's any talk that stirs the pot and suggests that some of these self-righteous types might be, well, self-righteous!
i guess some folks forget that the media has a teeny-tiny habit of sensationalizing the stories they report.

[Vanje]

9. Read the indictment. Crimes were committed.

There are 8 pages of sickening details. Lots of witness corroboration, the girl's own admissions , and those of their co-workers. Read it.
Read it right here:
http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/years/2008/1202081minn1.html

The senile patients did not make it up. They did not victimize or frame their "care-givers".

Yeah. In a court of law, innocence is presumed.
But there is no writ limiting MY assumption that these girls are guilty, and theres no writ limiting my expression of that assumption.

[RobinA]

13. My Experience Too

I work at a state hospital and while there isn't much plotting going on, there are some wild, WILD accusations. One woman claims she fell because staff tied her shoelaces together. Then she accused a doctor of stealing all her clothes for his wife. All in a days work.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

15. I don't know what's wrong with rural Minnesota, but there was a

case a year or two before in which some local young people admitted to walking into nursing homes and dousing dementia patients with ice water just to make them scream.

I suspect that they're the same type of kids who would be tormenting street people if they lived in a big city.

[mduffy31]

17. That was up here in my neck of the woods in Cloquet MN

If you saw the place that those kids came from you can see why things like that happen.


and FYI, Cloquet is essentially a "suburb" of Duluth, and we are pretty big.

[CubFan7125]

19. It 21 Miles

From Cloquet to Duluth it 21 miles. You are not a suburb. It's probably 12 miles from Spirit Mountain to Cloquet so even using the charitable mileage you are not a suburb. You only have 11,000 people, that's pretty small. Cloquet is a pretty cool town, I used to work there. Unlike Proctor and Hermantown, you are not part of the Twin Ports.

[mduffy31]

20. Thank you for the geography lesson

I have just lived here for 33 years. I was just making a sarcastic point, and I am part of the Twin Ports seeing as my address is Duluth.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

21. If only one patient were making accusations or if several patients were making

accusations about different employees, then I would be more inclined to take this view.

But evidently, multiple patients accused the same employees.

[dflprincess]

22. Today's paper reported that the investigation began last spring

when an employee who was being fired for swearing in front of a patient was fired and s/he finally told what was going on.

[surrealAmerican]

5. It is not hard to understand that a parent ...

... would be reluctant to believe the worst about his child. Luckily, more objective people will be expected to determine her guilt or innocence.

[Rebubula]

7. Moron...

...however, your child is your child.

Sometimes, love can blind you to the obvious....

Still, the young woman (assuming charges are accurate) is a sadist and a criminal.

[proud progressive]

10. moron?

he's her father!
and sometimes vengence blinds you to fairness

[happygoluckytoyou]

11. SO WE ALL AGREE THEN... innocent until proven guilty AND charges pressed have reasonable validity?

[HopeHoops]

12. BUT WAIT - they are attractive white girls - LIVE 24x7 COVERAGE FROM ARUBA - ONLY ON FOX!

Okay, okay - just wishful thinking that they'll park Geraldo back in Aruba for a few months. A guy can dream, can't he?

[lavndrblue]

18. It's never the

fault of the child, just like in our schools. Mommy and Daddy come running to make sure that the victim is at fault not their darling and perfect son or daughter.