Ohio family says they plan to sue nursing home after matriarch's death ruled a homicide

The family of an Ohio woman who died of sepsis after she developed a pressure wound at a nursing home is calling for justice for their matriarch.

Lucy Garcia was 72 years old when she died on July 2. She had previously been a resident at Arbors at Oregon, a nursing home about 4½ miles southeast of Toledo.

Arbors at Oregon did not immediately respond to requests for comment Friday but Matt Mooney, an attorney representing the Garcia family, said the family wants to file a wrongful death suit against the facility.

“In Ohio, wrongful death … is any death that's caused by neglect, negligence, recklessness, willful conduct like an intentional homicide, that would all fall within a wrongful death case,” Mooney told USA TODAY.

The family has argued that the system running the nursing home set policies and procedures for their staff to abide by that led to Garcia’s death, Mooney said.

Mooney said the family wants “accountability from the Arbors of Oregon.”

“The family feels this is not an isolated incident at the Arbors,” he said. “The facility is being run by management and administration and the corporate parent of the Arbors directing the staff to do the impossible, to work harder, longer hours, to take more patients, do more with less. We think that was a recipe for disaster.”

Mooney and his team filed for records from the nursing home on Sept. 16 and are waiting for them to be delivered. Only then can the civil suit be filed.

The family’s case is based largely on the autopsy report after Garcia’s death, Mooney said.

The report, obtained by USA TODAY, says that her death was the result of “caretaker neglect resulting in complications of a sacral pressure wound.” The coroner ruled her manner of death homicide.

Mooney said this is a first for him.

“I've been practicing law in Ohio for nine years, primarily in medical malpractice cases and nursing home neglect cases, and I've never seen a coroner that unequivocal about the cause of a person's death being medical neglect under any circumstances,” Mooney said.

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Mooney said Garcia once lived independently but had a stroke that left her with weakness in the left side of her body. 

She lived with her son for a bit but the 24-hour care she needed became too much for the family to handle, so she was taken to Arbors of Oregon in October 2019. The Arbors of Oregon assured the family they could provide the care Garcia needed, Mooney said.

“For the most part, he did not have any major concerns with her care but began to notice beginning in early 2024 that when they came to visit their mom, the facility was no longer getting her up and out of bed,” Mooney said, adding that she was in bed most of the time and wasn’t put in her chair or up and moving, which prevents bed sores.

Her family also didn’t see anyone visiting her room to help her, Mooney recalled.

She soon complained about back pain and was rushed to St. Charles Hospital on June 19, where doctors learned she had a Stage 4 pressure ulcer on her backside.

The nursing home hadn’t told her family about the wound and “kept it covered up with bandages,” Mooney said, adding that Garcia died on July 2 from sepsis.

Her wound had gotten infected and spread to her bloodstream, he said.

Mooney said there was a similar case before Garcia’s at the facility where a care provider was charged with manslaughter, involuntary manslaughter, and two counts of neglect and abuse.

“A care provider was charged and convicted of those charges of involuntary manslaughter and patient abuse related to that treatment,” he said.

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Mooney said Garcia was part of a large family. She raised four sons on her own and was a “motherly figure to all the kids in the neighborhood.”

Everyone knew they could come to the Garcia home with open arms, he said.

“If their friends needed a place to stay for the night or needed a meal, Lucy was glad to get that and she was very adamant about her sons being raised right and being self-sufficient,” Mooney said. 

“Her family really viewed her as the center of their family unit, and she was included in just about every single one of her grandchildren and great-grandchildren's births,” Mooney said. 

She leaves behind nine great-grandchildren, 17 grandchildren and four sons. 

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“I think it's important to understand that certainly what happened to Lucy is a tragedy,” Mooney said. “We've already spoken with other folks who had loved ones at the Arbors of Oregon and have described very similar outcomes. We're going to find out why that is, and what the systems and policies and procedures were at Arbors that led to these kinds of outcomes for Lucy and other residents.”

He said Garcia’s family doesn’t want this to happen to anyone else, and they hope the attention her case is getting will prevent it from happening to another family. 

“No one deserves to be treated the way that Lucy was treated,” Mooney said. “No one deserves to suffer from a Stage 4 pressure ulcer. That's a complete tissue loss all the way down to her bone. They don't want to see that ever happen again.”

This story has been updated to correct the spelling of the victim's name.

Saleen Martin is a reporter on USA TODAY's NOW team. She is from Norfolk, Virginia – the 757. Follow her on Twitter at@SaleenMartin or email her atsdmartin@usatoday.com.