[BobbyB]

Aide found guilty of neglect


By AMANDA STEWART
astewart@potomacnews.com
Thursday, January 10, 2008



What happened to Charles Furry was inevitable, an attorney for Joann Williams, a home health care aide assigned to him, said during a two-day trial in Prince William Circuit Court this week.
Prosecutors said it was the result of "grotesquely inadequate care."

At the end of the second day of Williams' trial, Circuit Court Judge Richard B. Potter agreed with prosecutors, finding Williams guilty of abuse and neglect of an incapacitated adult.

Williams, 47, could face up to ten years in prison and a fine of up to $100,000 when she is sentenced in April.

In 2003, Charles Furry was a 55-year-old man with Lou Gehrig's disease, who lived alone in an apartment in Triangle. He had no family to take care of him.

County social workers recommended that he move to a nursing home, but Furry refused, instead choosing to stay alone in his Triangle apartment, witnesses testified.

Once he chose to stay home, the Woodbridge-based Sierra Home Health Care was contracted to provide his care.

Williams, a newly hired home health care aide, was assigned to his case.

Her job, during two months in the summer of 2003, was to visit his apartment, bathe and feed him, help him move around, perform light housekeeping and identify any other needs he had, prosecutors said during the trial.

Williams was to care for him for five to eight hours a day on weekdays.

That wasn't enough time to provide him the care he needed, Williams' attorney John Carroll said.

"He was in need of greater care," Carroll said. "People wanted him in nursing care and there were reasons for him to be in nursing care."

A registered nurse, Isatu Wurie, was assigned to supervise Furry's care and visit his apartment once every 30 days to check on him.

When Wurie arrived there on Aug. 21, 2003, she found Furry sitting immobile in an armchair covered in his own urine and drool, according to testimony during Wurie's trial in July. His feet were crawling with maggots and he appeared to have not been bathed or moved recently, witnesses said.

Paramedics took Furry to Potomac Hospital, where it took more than 30 minutes to decontaminate him before he could be treated, they said.

Furry died two weeks later of Lou Gehrig's disease.

Carroll said that what happened to Furry was "a tragic inevitability."

"It's something no one should have to go through, something no one wants to go through. But it shouldn't all fall on Joann Williams," Carroll said.

Prosecutors said that Williams was only "posing" as Furry's aide and that she did not do what she should have done to care for him.

Williams was also charged with making false statements and obtaining money by false pretenses. Prosecutors said she committed Medicaid fraud by claiming to do certain things for Furry when she did not.

Potter found her not guilty of three counts of making false statements and one count of obtaining money by false pretenses.

Wurie, the nursing supervisor, was also charged with abuse and neglect. A jury found her not guilty of the charge in July.

Williams will be held without bond until her sentencing hearing on April 3.

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