Andover care home failed to check staff backgrounds, suit says. A patient was raped.
A wrongful death lawsuit filed in federal court last week accuses an Andover assisted living and retirement facility of “grossly wanton and negligent” practices after it failed to conduct a timely background check on a staff member now facing criminal charges for raping one of its mentally-incapacitated residents.
The 68-year-old resident, who suffered from dementia leading up to her Aug. 25 death, endured an unknown number of sexual assaults at the hands of a certified nursing assistant in the less than five months she lived at the Mapleton Assisted Living facility, a lawyer for her daughter said Monday by phone.
After evidence surfaced suggesting the woman had been attacked, Mapleton administration turned a blind eye and took steps to dissuade an investigation, including discouraging her daughter from reporting her suspicions to police and discouraging a sexual assault exam, the lawsuit says.
A sexual assault kit processed by the Kansas Bureau of Investigation revealed the woman had on her genetic material from the nursing assistant, Muhammad Q. Akram, who is now charged in state court with raping a mentally deficient victim, records show. Her daughter’s attorney confirmed the woman is the victim in Akram’s criminal case.
Had Mapleton conducted a thorough and timely criminal background check on Akram, her “brutal rape” might have been avoided, the lawsuit suggests.
Mapleton did not return a phone message from The Eagle seeking comment Monday but did send an emailed statement to the newspaper Wednesday evening after this story published online.
In it, the facility denied the lawsuit’s accusations and said it was cooperating with authorities. The Mapleton, located at 1419 W. Central in Andover, has 37 beds, according to the Kansas Department for Aging and Disability Services.
“The well-being of our residents sits at the heart of everything we do each and every day. As an organization we took action once we learned of the alleged conduct of the now former employee and have been fully cooperating with law enforcement investigators,” the statement says.
“The Mapleton strongly denies the allegations in the lawsuit. Out of respect for the legal process we will not be commenting further on the specifics of the case.”
The defense attorney representing Akram in his criminal case did not return a phone message.
“The family is horrified. ... This is the memory that is burned into them,” said Randall Rathbun, the Wichita attorney who filed the lawsuit on behalf of the woman’s estate and her daughter.
The Eagle is not naming the woman because she is a victim of sexual assault.
“They just didn’t care. It was just a matter of hiring somebody and getting them in there,” Rathbun said.
The family is asking for $1.5 million including $750,000 in punitive damages.
The lawsuit, filed Friday, alleges Mapleton had Akram on staff for more than six months before it completed a background check that would have turned up severe-enough issues likely to disqualify him from working around vulnerable patients. Those include a 2005 rape allegation that was reported to police but never prosecuted; a sexual battery conviction that resulted from a 2006 report where the victim said Akram tried to buy her silence with pills; a 2008 decision by the Kansas Board of Healing Arts to restrict Akram’s solo contact with female patients following sexual misconduct allegations; and an 18-month federal prison sentence handed down in 2011 after he pleaded guilty in a food stamp fraud case, according to the lawsuit.
The woman’s family moved her into Mapleton on March 25, 2020, after she started suffering from frontotemporal dementia, “which robbed her of her ability to advocate for herself, meet her basic hygienic needs or feed herself” and also left her “unable to keep herself safe” and fully reliant on her caregivers.
“She was just absolutely at the mercy of the facility” and its hired help, Rathbun said by phone.
When the woman’s daughter moved her into the facility, she tried to set up a monitor and camera in her mother’s room but was given reassurance by the facility operator, Kim Dobbin that it wasn’t necessary and her mother would be safe.
The daughter “took great relief at the comment,” the lawsuit says.
But at some point in the following months, the woman became a sexual assault victim.
The woman’s daughter became concerned for her safety after a hospice nurse told her on July 30 that her mother’s pubic region and face had been shaved inexplicably, likely a day or two before the nurse noticed, the lawsuit says. Mapleton first blamed the hair removal on the hospice staff but later conceded that an employee — Akram — had come forward and admitted to doing it, according to the lawsuit.
The woman’s daughter, meanwhile, filed abuse and neglect reports with Andover police and the Kansas Department for Aging and Disability Services. A state investigator told the daughter that her mother should receive a sexual assault exam at a hospital, the lawsuit says.
While the daughter was waiting for hospital staff to administer the rape kit, Dobbin called her and told her that a staff member had confessed to shaving her mother’s hair, according to the lawsuit.
During the call she also “strongly advised against” the woman undergoing the sexual assault exam because it was “overly invasive,” the lawsuit says.
Around the same time, the daughter received a call from an Andover police detective who said Mapleton told him Akram had shaved her mother “to make it easier to keep her clean” and that “he didn’t see any reason to believe ... (the woman) had been sexually assaulted,” the suit says.
The daughter told the hospital to go ahead with the exam anyway then moved her mother to a different nursing facility.
“They encouraged my client to just let it drop since the predator had come forward and said he had done it for cleanliness,” Rathbun said.
But the daughter “just wasn’t about to be discouraged from this because she knew that it wasn’t right.”
The state aging and disability services department launched its investigation into the abuse and neglect report on Aug. 3 and tried several times to view facility video footage that showed who went in and out of the woman’s room at Mapleton from July 29-30. On Aug. 6, the daughter was told the Andover Police Department “had decided not to take the rape kit to the KBI for analysis,” but the state investigator pushed it through.
The woman died on Aug. 25. Rathbun said there was no autopsy performed but said in the suit that a “contributing factor to her death was the brutal rape.”
Analysis of the rape kit, which ultimately turned up Akram’s DNA, was completed several months later, according to the lawsuit.
Although the state requires nursing facilities to conduct criminal background checks on their staff members, Mapleton failed to complete Akram’s until June 24, 2020 — “over six months after he had began providing care to residents,” according to the lawsuit.
Akram no longer works for Mapleton. His employment ended on Aug. 3, Rathbun said.
A note in records tied to his criminal case says he is currently barred from working at any nursing home facility. He is awaiting trial, the records show.
“We really want to send a message in this case so people know the risk that you take when you put your mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters in a nursing home like this that don’t do what they are supposed to do,” Rathbun said.
This story was originally published January 27, 2021 at 5:01 AM.
