US asylum had 'fight club' among seniors

A group of North Carolina asylum workers is being charged with setting up a “fight club” for older people with dementia. According to the complaints, they encouraged the fighting and filmed the fighting, as well as attacking some patients and not providing help.

According to BuzzFeed News, employees Marilyn Latish McKey, Taneshia DeShawn Jordan and Tonacia Yvonne Tyson were arrested in early October after a video leak in which two Danby House geriatric care patients were seen fighting. The images show one of them falling and calling for help while the other continues to assault her.

(Source: Facebook / Danby House)

The video, allegedly filmed on June 19, also shows employees encouraging one of the elderly women to punch another's face and stop them from screaming. There are also images of one patient strangling the other under the eyes of the workers. At the police station, one of the detainees reportedly claimed that the strangled woman was difficult to deal with, deserved to be beaten, and therefore filmed the action.

Arrested employees, who are between 26 and 32 years old, were indicted for assault on disabled people and will be tried on November 14. Until then, they are released on bail.

Asylum forbidden to receive new patients

After the case made headlines in the US newspapers, the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services stepped in and banned Danby House from receiving new patients.

While visiting the site, authorities discovered a series of irregularities, starting with the lack of training of asylum officials, which led to numerous failures in administering medication to patients.

The employees arrested. (Source: Winston-Salem Journal / Reproduction)

According to the Winston-Salem Journal, records of seven patients were reviewed by Department of Health officials, and in six of them, the elderly were not given medications to treat problems such as high blood pressure, fluid accumulation, depression, dementia, and Alzheimer's. In another case, a patient with bipolar disorder was left without medication for 17 days.

After all this, the asylum administration reported that it dismissed the accused employees and began to adopt a more rigorous evaluation process for new hires, in addition to offering training to employees.