Maurice Rowland knew that the closure notice stuck on the front door of his workplace meant the assisted-living residential facility was to be closed Thursday night because of a license revocation.
But why, he wondered, were 19 of the center's 32 residents still there - some with Alzheimer's, others with what he believed to be schizophrenia, all of them hungry and wanting dinner.
Almost all the caregivers had left. The manager and owners were nowhere to be found. Rowland was the cook, hired three months earlier to prepare meals for the residents at Valley Springs Manor in Castro Valley.
"I didn't know what was going on, but I couldn't just leave them there," Rowland said Tuesday from his Hayward home. "We had built a friendship. So I did the best I could."
Over the next 40 hours, Rowland and two caregivers - none of whom had been scheduled to work or asked by management to stay - frantically cooked, cleaned and bathed the residents, gave them their medications, and helped them in and out of their beds and wheelchairs. But they were in over their heads, and there were medication foul-ups. Residents became ill, and Rowland and the caregivers called 911 six or seven times, he said, before emergency responders finally took the last of the residents Saturday.
Full Article and Source:
Cook, Caregivers Struggled to Aid Center's Residents
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