A 71-year-old Florida man's relatives are trying to figure out how their loved one ended up dead in a closet—and how more than a week passed without anyone realizing that. NBC News reports Elin Etienne had been receiving care at North Dade Nursing and Rehab in North Miami since early August for a planned 12-week stay after suffering a brain aneurysm. His niece says a message was sent to the family from the personal phone of a nursing home employee on Aug. 22 saying Etienne was missing. She says the family then phoned the nursing home and were told he had checked himself out—something the family say Etienne didn't "have the capacity to" do, per WSVN.
"We pleaded with them for the form to verify his [checkout] signature," says the niece, with the family noting he had also been diagnosed with dementia. "They refused. So we called the police to do a formal missing persons report." She says the family spent a week searching for the grandfather throughout the city, and that they were prevented from looking for him at the facility. On Monday, the family received word that a decomposed body had been found; it had a bracelet bearing Elin's name.
"We want to know what the cause of death was and why he died in a closet or if he died in a closet and why no one was looking in those areas and why that closet was untouched," another family member tells CBS News. (More nursing homes stories.)
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