Balfour Senior Living prides itself on providing luxury accommodations full of “extraordinary choices” for its older residents.

“Exquisitely prepared meals” are served from a seasonal menu, its website boasts. The staff is “meticulous about the details.”

Its Cherrywood Village facility in Louisville is at the “forefront of innovative memory care communities,” the company states, providing residents living with dementia a range of activities from music to pet therapy.

The company, though, has fallen under increased scrutiny after two employees and a contractor at Cherrywood Village were arrested last month, accused of falsely reporting an assault between two residents that police say never occurred. That came a year after a 97-year-old resident of a second Balfour facility in Louisville froze to death after being locked out of the building. One employee, now facing charges, has been tied to both incidents.

But a Denver Post review of state inspection records and court documents shows this isn’t the first time a Balfour at Cherrywood Village employee has been arrested on allegations of abusing a resident. On one occasion, an employee mocked a resident with cognitive and memory issues for her speech impediment and wetting her diaper before yanking a pair of underwear over her head and pushing her onto a couch, according to a Louisville police report.

Staff members and outside caregivers at multiple Balfour facilities have been suspended or fired for allegedly stealing a resident’s credit card, physically and verbally abusing a resident, violating residents’ rights and failing to report misconduct by other employees, state records show.

Meanwhile, the family of Mary Jo Staub, the 97-year-old who froze to death outside the Lavender Farms facility last year, alleged Balfour knew its staff slept during overnight shifts, hung out in the facility’s theater room, drank alcohol and failed to check on residents during the night.

Balfour employees, after the woman’s death, then “fed lies and misleading statements to the Louisville Police Department to avoid criminal charges,” the family alleged in a January lawsuit.

Balfour has not commented on Staub’s death, the lawsuit or the employee arrests. Michele Sepples, Cherrywood Village’s executive director, declined to address the various incidents when a reporter visited the facility last week. Other Balfour representatives did not respond to repeated emails and phone calls seeking comment.

“Verbally degrading” a resident

Louisville police have responded to Balfour at Cherrywood Village at least 10 times since 2020, according to records from the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment — which regulates nursing homes and assisting living facilities — and police documents.

Senior living facilities are required to contact law enforcement in cases of physical, verbal or sexual abuse and nearly all of these cases ended without criminal charges.

But on March 16, 2020, police responded to the Louisville facility on reports of a caretaker assault.

A witness told officers she and another Balfour staffer, Alex Febiri, were assisting a resident with cognitive and memory issues. The resident, who is not named, had soiled her diaper and needed to be changed, an officer wrote in an incident report.

As the two caretakers changed the woman, Febiri, then 64, began “verbally degrading” the resident, mocking her speech impediment, telling her she was poor and that “he had paid for everything that she had,” the report stated.

Febiri then yanked the resident out of the bathroom, continuing to verbally degrade her, Louisville police said. The other caretaker told authorities that Febiri took a pair of briefs or underwear garments and “placed it on top of her head and held the bottom together under her chin, preventing her from seeing.”

The older resident flailed her arms, attempting to hit him so he’d release the clothing from her head, according to the report. Febiri then pushed the resident so that she fell onto a couch, the witness told police.

Febiri was arrested and charged with third-degree assault of an at-risk person, neglect and harassment, court records show. He pleaded guilty to the assault charge, receiving a deferred judgment. His record is set to be sealed this week and the charge dismissed.

Febiri, who could not be reached for this story, told police that he recalled similar events surrounding changing the resident but denied putting clothing over her head. An attorney who represented him during the 2020 case did not return phone calls.

Discipline, firings and infractions

While this case represented particularly egregious caregiver conduct, state records show other Balfour employees and outside caregivers have been disciplined or fired from its Colorado facilities.

An unnamed nurse was let go along with Febiri after an internal investigation found she possibly had prior knowledge of the employee’s “rough handling” of residents and didn’t report it, according to state health department documents.

In September 2020, a male resident in his 70s told his wife that a “big guy that works at night tackled me,” records show. The man reported being grabbed and shoved into his room and told to stay there. He sported a bruise from the alleged incident.

The resident identified a staff member, who was not named. Balfour asked this individual not to return after it became apparent he had limited dementia training, according to state records.

Louisville police, in an incident report, could not find evidence a crime had been committed.

At Balfour’s Central Park facility in Denver, at least one staff member was fired and three other employees were suspended for various infractions since 2019, health department records show.

In one incident, in July 2021, an internal investigation found a staff member physically and verbally abused a resident in his 90s. Witnesses said the employee slapped the older man’s hand down before thrusting her finger into the resident’s forehead and pushing his head onto a pillow, according to a summary of the incident. The resident died two weeks later.

The employee was fired, and state regulators found the witnesses didn’t report the occurrence immediately, as is required by law. Denver police investigated the incident for possible elder abuse, but the case was refused by the district attorney, according to police records.

Two other employees of the Denver senior living facility were suspended and given “final corrective action notices” in January of that year for providing care to a female resident in her 80s without consent, health department records indicate. Both were also found to be at fault for not reporting the abuse.

Health department regulators have routinely cited Balfour’s facilities for a variety of infractions, though many were not deemed severe.

Citations include not conducting criminal background checks for employees, failing to respond in a timely manner to resident calls for help and personnel file violations.

The Central Park facility, cited 11 times last year, was dinged in one case for failing to provide care “free from humiliation and punishment.”

One quadriplegic resident was forced to move out of the residence after filing a grievance for not receiving timely care, state regulators found.

“I was sitting naked in my shower chair by the front door when the kitchen delivered my breakfast,” the resident told investigators, accusing the company of retaliating against him for reporting the incidents. “This is completely humiliating. Not only are you taking time from me that cannot be replaced, but you are thoroughly embarrassing me.”

In another citation, the health department found Balfour staff had not administered medications to multiple residents for long stretches.

One resident failed to receive 96 doses of Parkinson’s medication over a four-month span, resulting in a series of falls and injuries. Another individual missed 55 doses of an antidepressant.

A resident freezes to death

The state health department’s investigation into Lavender Farms after Staub’s death last year prompted a more serious citation, determining the facility placed “an immediate jeopardy risk of injury or death to all 53 current residents residing in the residence.”

Around midnight on Feb. 26, 2022, the 97-year-old Staub walked out of the building in the middle of the night and the doors locked behind her. Standing in 15-degree weather — clad in a nightgown, robe, boots and gloves — Staub screamed and banged on the windows to no avail. She froze to death on the sidewalk.

Current and former staff told investigators that there had been numerous times in which business owners and neighbors had called the facility to inform them that a resident was walking down the street or entered their store and didn’t know how to get back.

One employee said “there was no system in place to know for sure if residents were inside or outside the residence,” according to the state’s report. The anonymous staff said that there had been “no measures in place to prevent (Staub) from exiting the residence and subsequently dying.”

Two years earlier, staff discovered a female resident in her 80s missing from Cherrywood Village’s secured memory care unit. She had been gone for 45 minutes without staff knowing, state regulators said, leaving through a gate that was found to have malfunctioned due to a fire alarm.

The resident was unharmed, but was “confused and disoriented and at risk to self,” the state health department wrote.

Three months after Staub’s death, a woman in her 70s left Denver’s Central Park facility for more than two hours without staff noticing, according to Balfour’s internal investigation that was sent to the state. A good Samaritan found her trying to cross a road in her wheelchair.

Louisville police investigated Staub’s death but did not recommend the Boulder County district attorney bring criminal charges, said Shannon Carbone, a DA spokesperson. The district attorney reached the same conclusion after reviewing the investigation.

“In this tragic situation, there was insufficient evidence because… Lavender Farms is an assisted living facility and not a nursing home,” Carbone wrote in an email. “That is a significant difference in terms of the level of care required and provided.”

Police confirmed that one of the caregivers checked on Staub during the nightly rounds, she said.

“To prove a case of this nature, the DA’s office would need to prove a gross deviation from the standard of care by the two caregivers,” Carbone wrote.

Staub’s family, though, says Balfour employees repeatedly lied to police and omitted key details during the investigation.

The two staffers on duty that night spent the bulk of their shift in the Lavender Farms’ third-floor theater room, leaving the nurse’s station unattended for almost six hours, the family’s attorneys wrote in an amended complaint filed last month.

The lawsuit also accuses Balfour of breaking the law by not reporting to the state that a second resident also wandered the halls and exited the building the same night. (She was found in the morning locked in the vestibule.)

The family’s attorneys call into question several employees’ testimony to police, including Lavender Farms’ acting supervisor, Dainzu Mosqueda.

She allegedly told officers that the two overnight staff members were busy dealing with the other resident the night Staub died — despite surveillance footage showing this resident wandering the halls alone before getting trapped in the building’s vestibule for hours.

Mosqueda is also one of the three workers from Cherrywood Village facing charges over falsely reporting an assault between two residents in January that police say never happened.

Police took a 92-year-old man into custody on Jan. 10 after two workers — Joshua Merrill, a staff member, and Kara Roberts, a contractor — told them that the resident struck his wife multiple times while visiting her residence.

But when officers reviewed surveillance two weeks later, they realized the assault never occurred, according to arrest affidavits.

Mosqueda allegedly told police she was instructed by higher-ups at Balfour not to tell authorities about the video footage, her arrest affidavit states. She was charged with one count related to the mandatory reporting of mistreatment of at-risk elders and is set for arraignment in May.

Merrill and Roberts face charges of attempt to influence a public servant — a felony — as well as caretaker neglect and two counts of false reporting.

None of the three have responded to requests for comment.

Fines capped at $2,000 a year

Multiple arrests at one senior living facility are hardly an everyday occurrence, said Erica Corson, Boulder County’s long-term care regional ombudsman.

She could only think of three other situations in 12 years in the county that led to arrests.

“It’s not common,” Corson said.

Balfour, generally, has a great reputation, said Cindy Cook, owner and founder of Aging at 5280, a senior placement and referral agency.  She pointed to severe staffing shortages that have decimated the senior care industry, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“It’s a burnout business,” she said.

Despite multiple serious violations, Balfour assisted living residences in Colorado have been fined just six times over the past five years, totaling $5,250, a state health department spokesperson said.

Lavender Farms was fined $1,500 after Staub’s death and $500 in January. Central Park was docked $1,000 each in February and October 2022. Another Denver residence — Balfour at Riverfront Park — paid $750 in 2021. And Balfour Retirement Community in Louisville was issued a $500 fine last year.

Cherrywood Village was not fined.

The Central Park residence, however, couldn’t have been fined a cent more last year. The state health department only has the authority to levy $2,000 per facility per year.

Those are paltry numbers compared to other states. In Florida, fines for the most severe incidents at assisted living facilities cannot be less than $5,000 and can reach up to $10,000 per violation. Oregon, in cases of substantiated abuse that results in death, serious injury, rape or sexual abuse, can levy up to $15,000 per violation.

Other Colorado industries face far steeper financial consequences for misconduct.

The Division of Insurance can hit companies with up to $750,000 in penalties in the most extreme cases. The Public Utilities Commission is able to levy up to $11,000 per violation for some transportation and towing infractions.

Even gas and electric regulators in the state — which cannot impose penalties of more than $2,000 — can assess double and triple penalties in some circumstances.

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