A Tooele man faces charges after police found his aging father starved and covered in feces in a trailer home with no food, electricity or running water and only a bucket for a toilet — three weeks after police first learned the victim was being neglected.
The 87-year-old victim died less than a month after his granddaughter found him lying on the floor of a Salt Lake County trailer home on May 6, 2017, prosecutors wrote in charges filed this week. Investigators found a bucket of dirty water and a rag on the floor near where the man was lying; the man said that was his toilet, charges state.
The victim told paramedics he hadn’t eaten in awhile, that he was in pain, and he hadn’t been able to get out of bed for “a couple of weeks,” prosecutors wrote. The victim was in critical condition when he was taken to a hospital, where he was diagnosed with “extensive” dehydration and diarrhea, severe malnourishment, acute renal failure, bedsores and sepsis from a urinary tract infection, the charges state.
Prosecutors wrote that he also was deemed at risk of “refeeding syndrome" — a set of complications that can occur if a malnourished person is given food too quickly. The man weighed only 118 pounds when he arrived at the hospital, down from 152 pounds when he was hospitalized in 2014.
“It took a nurse approximately an hour to bathe (the victim) due to the excessive amount of feces and detritus stuck to him,” prosecutors wrote.
The man was later transferred to a rehabilitation center for further care, but he died on May 28, 2017 — 22 days after he was found.
The granddaughter’s report was not the first police had heard of the victim’s neglect. A Unified Police Officer had gone to the trailer on April 16, 2017, for a welfare check and found the victim “to be living under neglected conditions.” The man identified his adult son as his caretaker; the son “admitted that he needed to arrange better care for [his father] and that he would work on it,” prosecutors wrote.
When the father was found in critical condition three weeks later, the officer spoke with the son again. “He admitted that he hasn’t cared for [his father] for the last few days,” prosecutors wrote.
After the victim died, another relative told police that he’d gotten a call from the victim’s credit union, reporting that the son had tried to empty the victim’s bank account. The credit union manager said the son had previously taken the victim to the bank many times to withdraw cash; he once tried to use his father’s bank account to cash a check for another person, and when the manager wouldn’t allow it, the son got angry, prosecutors wrote.
According to the charges, he told the manager: “You guys are going to be the reason I don’t get anything when he dies.”
The credit union manager also produced 10 checks that the son wrote on the father’s account while he was in the hospital and after his death, prosecutors wrote. The checks totaled more than $450.
The relative who told police about the suspicious bank activity also said the son did not attend the victim’s funeral.
The son, 52, was charged with second-degree felony aggravated abuse of a vulnerable adult and third-degree felony exploitation of a vulnerable adult.
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