“I wonder where in Georgia Bob Dean lives,” mused Westbank security guard Joseph Savona, the son of Grace Ann Savona – one of the 843 former nursing home residents Bob Dean shoe-horned into an ill-equipped, under-staffed Independence, Louisiana warehouse in the aftermath of Hurricane Ida three years ago this week.
Conditions in the warehouse were inhumane and squalid which led to the death of at least seven residents and the revocation of the licenses for all of Dean’s facilities, several of which were sold last week to a national rehab and mental health company. “Arriving without her medicines, my mother suffered greatly in that warehouse, broke her leg and was never herself again,” Savona explained. “The puny settlement our family received was just a drop in the bucket as to what we all deserved.”
A class action suit on behalf of the former residents was filed in September 2021 by a team of attorneys led by Rob Couhig and Suzette Bagneris. The individual plaintiffs or their heirs only received $1,000 to date. Court records show that the attorneys for the class have already been allocated millions in fees.
In July 2024 Dean pled no contest to 15 felony charges including cruelty to persons with infirmities, Medicaid fraud and obstruction of justice. He was fined more than $1 million and sentenced to three years of probation rather than jail time, a disappointment to Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill as well as to Savona and other loved ones.
Now the plaintiffs and families are disappointed again. Attorneys representing the class are trying to take a 10% cut from the personal trust accounts many residents set up within a larger segregated account at their nursing homes. The resident trust fund accounts – totaling $1,438,078 – held government checks, hurricane relief and covid funds, and contributions from family members.
Without properly notifying members of the class by mail, attorneys are seeking to peel off $143,807 to divide up among themselves as a legal fee. The lawyers for the class allege that the accounts were “missing” and that they found them, necessitating the fee. In reality, Special Masters appointed by Judge Mentz with their paid assistants and a Bob Dean former employee sorted out the owner of each resident trust account. “The plaintiff attorneys did little to earn this additional fee,” said Savona.
On Wednesday, August 28 – two days before the third anniversary of Hurricane Ida- attorneys for former nursing home resident Lisa Renard will appear in Judge Michael Mentz’s courtroom in Jefferson Parish to oppose the new fee splitting arrangement. On the day Hurricane Ida hit, Renard was recovering from the loss of a leg due to diabetes in Dean’s West Jefferson Healthcare Center. Renard spent four days tied to a wheelchair in the filthy Tangipahoa Parish warehouse. She has recently been hospitalized and could lose her other leg.
Renard’s attorney Arthur Morrell will argue before Judge Mentz that 100% of funds in the resident trust accounts should only be dispersed to the residents or heirs to whom the money belongs. “Lisa Renard and many of the other victims will never recover physically or emotionally from the damage inflicted upon them. Victims like Lisa deserve every dollar legally available to them,” Morrell concluded.
