"Are you angry? Because I'm mad as hell," St. Louis Mayor Tishaura Jones said at a rally Tuesday protesting the abrupt closure of the city's largest nursing home. Employees and relatives of Northview Village's 170 residents say the long-term care facility shut down without warning on Friday, leaving 180 workers unemployed and unpaid days before Christmas, and leaving relatives trying to find out where residents had been sent, the New York Times reports. On Tuesday, some relatives were still trying to find their loved ones because of the "emergent nature of the relocation," said Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services spokeswoman Liz Cox.
The nursing home, operated by St. Louis-based Healthcare Accounting Services, closed so abruptly that some residents left with little more than the clothes they were wearing, the AP reports. The manager of one of around a dozen care centers that residents were taken to says residents arrived without records or lists of the medications they should be taking. Workers said they were supposed to be paid on Friday morning, and after the direct deposits never arrived, they were told they would receive paper checks, reports the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. The checks didn't appear Friday afternoon—but a line of vans to take residents away did,
"This was the paycheck they were expecting before Christmas," says Lenny Jones, Missouri director of the Service Employees International Union, per the Times. The Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services says it has launched an investigation. At Tuesday's rally, where some speakers said criminal charges should be filed, Jones led a chant of "Shame." "Shame on this owner for treating the people who live in this facility like pawns who can just be moved on a moment's notice," the mayor said. "Shame on this owner for not paying the employees what they deserve and just shutting down this facility in the dead of night." (More nursing home stories.)
,
uBlock 
,
and
Ghostery 
)
