60II: Mixed Company

The next time you think about putting an elderly loved one into a nursing home, remember that they may have some unusual neighbors. They may be young and potentially violent mentally ill. The number of clinically diagnosed psychotics in nursing homes has more than doubled in the past ten years. Correspondent Jim Stewart reports for 60 Minutes II.

It unfolded at Jacksonville Terrace, a local nursing home, at about 1:30 a.m. on May 25, 1997. Staff members noticed 20-year-old resident Victor Reyes, a newcomer to the home, talking quietly with 69-year-old Gladys Tipsword, a fellow resident.

Ninety minutes after they went into the shower room, Michael was summoned to make an immediate search of Jacksonville Terrace. Victor Reyes, he was told, was missing.

"And I was going down B-Hall and I ran across the shower they entered," Michael says. "And the first thing I noticed was the privacy curtain's chains were on the floor. And then I seen a blood trail that led me into the shower. And that's when I found Gladys. She was naked, slumped in the corner in the shower. Kind of just left there. . . I hollered for the nurse and stayed with her, and told her to hang in there. That's about all I could do at the time. I couldn't hardly recognize her, she'd been beaten so bad."

Victor Reyes had slipped over a back fence and made his way to a neighboring town, where he stole a car. He encountered three bicyclists out for a morning ride. The impact was at high speed, and there were no skid marks.

Charlie Grojean was in the lead and says Reyes appeared out of nowhere. Grojean and one biker were thrown to the side of the road. The third cyclist was dragged 150 feet underneath the front bumper, dying instantly. Victor Reyes was seriously wounded, but survived.

How did Reyes get into Jacksonville in the first place? The state of Illinois put him there. Victor Reyes had become a ward of the state when he was four years old, after all six of his siblings died in a Chicago house fire. Taken from his mother, he was bounced from foster hme to group home to mental ward, a chronic discipline problem and psychiatric enigma.

"He's very childlike, and gets this little giggle going, and it's just like talking to a 12-year-old most of the time," Michael says. "He would usually be sleeping underneath his bed."

By the time he was 20, Victor Reyes was diagnosed as schizophrenic, and the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services had finally run out of places to put him. Jacksonville Terrace was accustomed to older residents, but finally agreed to take him in.

Wendy Meltzer, an advocate for nursing home residents in Illinois, says that mentally ill patients can be good money for nursing homes. Patients can be worth as much as $110 a day. As more state mental institutions close their doors, more seriously ill patients are winding up in nursing homes. The nursing homes benefit by filling empty beds. Jacksonville Terrace took in about six mentally ill patients, including Victor Reyes, all at once.

Meltzer says the introduction of a young mentally ill patient with a violent history into a nursing home atmosphere was a recipe for disaster.

"You don't have to be a mental health expert to know that that's just not how you would want your mother or your grandmother to be living," says Meltzer. "They're figuring that they can take this person and get away with it, because nobody's going to slam them for doing it, and nobody's going to notice."

Gladys Tipsword was experiencing the effects of old age and, like Victor Reyes, schizophrenia. But after the attack, it took trauma surgeons several weeks to stabilize her condition. When her daughter-in-law Sandra Tipsword finally saw her, she was still in bad shape.

"She was on a ventilator. She had feeding tubes in her. She was thrashing around like she was fighting, with her feet moving. AndÂ…she was in a coma," Sandra remembers.

The home that Gladys had known at Jacksonville Terrace had changed in her final months there. Constant fighting among the new mix of residents brought out the police more often, from 14 times in the year before their arrival to more than 70 times after. Dispatch records show reports of battery, arson, and deadly threats. That's why Darin Michael was simply relieved that night to see Victor talking and walking quietly with another resident, even if the destination might have seemed a bit odd.

"At the time there was kind of a lot of stuff going on but it seemed relatively innocent," says Michael. "It seemed like she was holding the door open like you would. . . just direct a child off to wash his hands or his face."

When Victor Reyes arrived at Jacksonville Terrace, he entered a different world from the one to which he was accustomed. He was accorded his basic rights, like the right to privacy and to consensual sex. He was taught about safe sex, and he had access to condoms at a nurse's station. Nineteen days before he attacked Gladys Tipsord, Victor had expressed a desire to become sexually active, and the staff had instructed him in all the rules.

"He wanted to have sex with this woman. And when she refused him, rebuffed him, he became violent," says Charles Colburn, the state's attorney in Jacksonville, Illinois. He prosecuted Victor Reyes for the death of the bicyclist and the assault on Gladys Tipsword. "And that apparently, from the history we've seen from him, has been a pattern of his behavior. He can be the non-threatening Victor Reyes. And you can flick a switch and he can be the very dangerous, very violent Victor Reyes."

Records show that within hours of his arrival, Reyes struck a fellow resident. In his first month there, a psychiatric examination ominously concluded he was a mild risk to himself, and a severe risk to others. He made death threats one minute, and propositioned nurses the next.

Citing an ongoing lawsuit, Jacksonville Terrace refused to talk to 60 Minutes II, but they say the state screened Victor Reyes, as required by law, and determined that a nursing home was an appropriate place for him. Not only did the owners of Jacksonville Terrace refuse requests to talk, so did the lobbying association that represents them, as well as the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services, the agency which placed Victor in Jacksonville Terrace.

But the Jacksonville Terrace nursing staff wasn't always able to give Victor Reyes the attention he required. On at least 37 occasions, Reyes did not receive his anti-psychotic medication because he was asleep at the time it was due. And the state did not require the staff to have any special training to treat the mentally ill.

The state found the home substandard, and wanted to shut it down by cutting off its federal funding. But Jacksonville Terrace got a court order forbidding such an action, so the state ended up settling for a $60,000 fine.

Wendy Meltzer calls that a slap on the wrist. "If you look at incident after incident, where there are long term situations of people being aggressive and violent, or sexually abusive towards nursing home residents and staff, nobody reports it. Nobody's reported it for a really long period of time," says Meltzer.

Dr. John Lumpkin, director of the Illinois Department of Public Health, says the state was on top of the case. After Reyes attacked Gladys Tipsword, the state investigated, and found the home substandard and wanted to shut it down by cutting off its federal funding. But Jacksonville Terrace got a court order forbidding that, so the state ended up settling for a $60,000 fine.

Wendy Meltzer calls that a slap on the wrist: "If you look at incident after incident, where there are long-term situations of people being aggressive and violent. Or sexually abusive towards nursing home residents, and staff. Nobody reports it. Nobody's reported it for a really long period of time."

Sandra Tipsword now visits er mother-in-law at a different nursing home, one capable of handling a patient on a ventilator. Since the attack, she has seen little change in her mother-in-law's condition.

"She'll be on this thing the rest of her life," says Sandra. "Her hands are contracted. She cannot walk. This is her prognosis. She tries to talk to us, but it's like a whisper."

Victor Reyes was convicted for the murder of the bicyclist and the assault on Gladys Tipsword. He is expected to spend a minimum of 67 years in prison.