A Louisiana nursing home owner who sent more than 800 residents to a squalid warehouse with what the authorities called poor sanitation and inadequate food supplies while they braced for Hurricane Ida in 2021 was sentenced on Monday to three years’ probabtion, despite prosecutors’ calls for prison time.
The man, Bob Glynn Dean Jr., 70, pleaded no contest the 15 criminal charges he faced, including cruelty to persons with infirmity, Medicaid fraud and obstruction of justice on Monday at the Tangipahoa Parish Courthouse in Amite, La.
Judge Brian Abels of the 21st Judicial District Court sentenced Mr. Dean to 20 years in prison, but deferred the sentence and placed him on probation for three years. Mr. Dean will not have to serve any time behind bars if he successfully completes his probation.
Mr. Dean was also ordered to pay more than $355,000 in restitution to the state’s Department of Health and more than one million dollars as a monetary penalty to the state’s Department of Justice.
Liz Murrill, the Louisiana attorney general, said in a statement on Monday that prosecutors had “urged that Mr. Dean be held accountable for his conduct” and asked that he be sentenced to a minimum of five years in prison.
“I respect our judicial system, and that the judge has the ultimate discretion over the appropriate sentence,” Mr. Murrill said. “But I remain of the opinion that Dean should be serving prison time.”
Garrison Jordan, Mr. Dean’s lawyer, called the sentence “appropriate.”
“We resolved the case through the no contest plea and believe the sentence was appropriate based on that factors that the court dictated into the record,” Mr. Jordan said.
Mr. Dean was not available for comment, Mr. Jordan said.
Mr. Dean, who owned seven nursing homes in Louisiana, was out of state when he ordered nursing home residents in Baton Rouge, La., to evacuate on Aug. 26, 2021, as Hurricane Ida approached.
He told staff members to move everyone to a warehouse in Independence referred to as the Waterbury Facility, where they braced for severe weather, according to a 2022 arrest affidavit prepared by the state attorney general’s office. Independence, which has a population under 2,600, ended up being one of the areas most damaged by the storm.
There, nursing home residents were subjected to overcrowding, the smell of urine and feces, piles of trash beside puddles of water and inadequate food, the affidavit states. Seven people from the nursing homes died, according to the Louisiana Department of Health, which revoked the licenses of Mr. Dean’s seven facilities to operate as nursing homes.
As the authorities investigated, Mr. Dean refused to cooperate and ordered that his employees do the same, the authorities alleged.
In May 2022, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced it was prohibiting Mr. Dean from participating in federal health care programs.
Mr. Dean was arrested on June 22, 2022, and faced eight counts of cruelty to persons with infirmities, two counts of obstruction of justice and five counts of Medicaid fraud, according to the attorney’s general office.
Hurricane Ida made landfall as an intense Category 4 storm on Aug. 29, 2021, pummeling the state and leaving the power grid in shambles and millions of customers without power for days.
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