Sex offenders living secretly in nursing homes

By CATHERINE CANDISKY

More than 100 registered sex offenders live in Ohio nursing homes — their convictions for rape, gross sexual imposition and sexual battery generally kept secret from other residents and their families.

A gap in state law requiring notification of anybody who lives within 1,000 feet of a sex offender does not require nursing-home owners to inform residents, family members or guardians when an offender moves into the facility.

A Dispatch computer analysis comparing state records of long-term-care facilities with the Sex Offender Registration and Notification list shows that 110 nursing-home residents and six employees are registered sexual offenders. Fifty-one are concentrated at four nursing homes. The other 65 are scattered at 53 homes across the state.

Ohio’s total has nearly tripled since 2004, said Wes Bledsoe, head of the Perfect Cause, an Oklahoma- based nonprofit that has been tracking sex offenders in nursing homes for five years.

About two-thirds of the offenders in nursing homes are from Tier 3, the most-serious category, which includes those who have committed such crimes as rape, sexual battery, kidnapping a minor and gross sexual imposition on a child younger than 12. Not all are elderly; in fact, about two dozen are 50 or younger, in nursing homes because of their physical or mental condition.

“We’re seeing a system that’s getting worse instead of better,” Bledsoe said. “We’re seeing more assaults in facilities. Many times, the assailants are never charged.”

Perfect Cause has documented at least 60 murders, rapes and serious assaults nationwide in nursing homes by residents who are sex offenders, including a rape of a mentally retarded woman in Cincinnati who was in the facility because of her condition.

The legal loophole touches a nerve with that woman’s father, Ray McDaniel of Fairfield, Ohio. Ashley K. McDaniel, 18, was raped early the morning of Aug. 21, 2005, by Rickey Smith, a registered sex offender living in the facility.

McDaniel said the nursing home didn’t alert him, call the police or seek medical treatment until he and his wife visited nearly 48 hours after the attack.

Smith was convicted of the crime, served about two years in prison, and is now living in a Cincinnati group home.

“I think he should have been chemically castrated,” McDaniel said.

Despite the growing number of registered sex offenders in Ohio nursing homes, advocates for seniors and other long-term-care residents say most are unaware of the potential risk. With no legal requirement that facilities pass along the information, most don’t.