Lexington man on mission to mandate cameras at assisted living homes after mother’s death
In December 2019, a few months after Stella Kyzer moved into a Lexington County assisted living facility, the 86-year-old’s family stopped by one night to serenade her with Christmas carols.
But their matriarch wasn’t in her room, or anywhere else in the senior living center, and the facility’s staff couldn’t tell them where she was.
The family eventually found Kyzer outside, lying in the road with “massive” head injuries, her son Darrell Hudson said. Unbeknownst to staff, she had exited the building into the darkness and fallen off a curb, according to a lawsuit the family brought against Lakeside Place Senior Living.
When Hudson, a Lexington County councilman, sought video footage of the incident to better understand how his mother could have left the building unnoticed, he was shocked to learn Lakeside Place did not have cameras.
“There’s cameras at McDonald’s, there’s cameras at the bank, there’s cameras at the county building, there’s cameras at the State House, there’s cameras in Lexington and Richland County animal shelters,” he said. “But we don’t have cameras in the exits and entrances and the public areas of nursing homes.”
So in September 2020, Hudson sent a resolution backed by Lexington County Council asking the county’s state delegation to pursue legislation to change that. Nearly 18 months later, a bill that would require cameras in assisted living facilities sponsored by state Reps. Paula Calhoon, R-Lexington, and Chris Wooten, R-Lexington, may finally get a hearing.
A date has not been set, but Calhoon said she expects the Medical, Military, Public and Municipal Affairs Committee to debate the bill soon.
If it does, the discussion would be timely.
Police recently evacuated another Lexington County assisted living facility after finding a resident dead of pneumonia and no medical staff present. State health officials cited Twilite Manor in Cayce for failing to maintain adequate staffing and failing to provide residents breakfast and medications on the morning of the incident.
Wooten called it a “terrible coincidence” that his bill, which was filed almost a year ago, may soon get a hearing and said Hudson, not the recent situation at Twilite Manor, was the impetus for the legislation.
“He brought it to our attention that there were no external cameras on the facilities, or no cameras monitoring in and out of the doors,” Wooten said. “It’s completely a safety issue. That’s why I got behind it.”
While it’s not clear that having cameras on site at Twilite Manor would have prevented the man’s death, Hudson believes it could have helped and worries preventable tragedies will continue to happen until they’re mandated.
More than two years since his mother’s fall, he said he still doesn’t know exactly what happened and remains racked with guilt over the decision to place her at the facility.
Lakeside Place, which recently settled its suit with Kyzer’s family for an undisclosed sum, did not respond to a request for comment.
“If it wasn’t for my family members being there, she would have frozen to death or bled out,” said Hudson, who wondered aloud whether such an end might have been preferable to the suffering Kyzer endured afterward.
“She never recovered from the fall,” he said of his mother, who died 10 months later.
Camera bill faces pushback
The bill filed by Calhoon and Wooten would require community residential care facilities, known colloquially as assisted living facilities, to install video cameras at all entrances, exits and common areas and provide continuous monitoring of those areas.
It also would make assisted living facilities maintain a lower resident-to-staff ratio during off-peak hours than currently is required. Rather than 30-to-1, as is the current minimum standard, it calls for a 22-to-1 ratio of residents to staff or direct care volunteers from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m.
While Hudson sees the proposal as a commonsense solution to an obvious problem and finds it hard to believe anyone would oppose it, the bill likely faces an uphill battle against the state’s powerful long-term care industry.
Randy Lee, president of the South Carolina Health Care Association, which represents the interests of nursing homes and a small number of assisted living facilities in the state, said his organization supports proposals that create a safer and more secure environment for residents, but staunchly opposes placing cameras inside long-term care facilities.
Lee was among a number of nursing home industry officials who seven years ago worked to derail a Senate bill that sought to give families the ability to install cameras in the rooms of their loved ones at long-term care centers to combat caregiver abuse and neglect.
He said facility operators and many long-term care residents oppose the proposal due to privacy issues. Some smaller assisted living facilities also have raised concerns about the cost of buying, monitoring and maintaining cameras, which Lee said can be very expensive.
State Sen. Katrina Shealy, R-Lexington, who is familiar with Hudson’s plight and also has worked on legislation in response to it, said she thought affixing cameras in common areas rather than private rooms might prove more palatable to people with privacy concerns.
But for the long-term care industry, Lee said, any camera requirements are almost certainly a nonstarter.
“I think that (facility operators) and some of their residents feel that cameras inside the building would be intrusive, wherever they are placed,” he said.
Regardless of the rift over cameras, Calhoon said she’s eager to work with assisted living center operators, residents and their loved ones to find a solution that’s amenable to all parties and enhances safety.
“I don’t know what the bill’s going to look like coming out,” she said, “But this is an opportunity to get the dialogue going.”
Hudson, however, remains skeptical of the long-term care industry’s opposition to cameras and believes it’s rooted in a desire to keep the public blind to what goes on inside facilities.
He said he hopes lawmakers have the fortitude to vote their conscience on this issue.
“How someone can look in the mirror and vote against this bill is beyond me,” Hudson said. “I just hope that our senators and legislators have the backbone to do the right thing.”
This story was originally published February 27, 2022 at 5:00 AM with the headline "Lexington man on mission to mandate cameras at assisted living homes after mother’s death."