Bob Dean, the nursing home and real estate magnate, became something of a supervillain after officials with the Louisiana Department of Health, citing horrific conditions, shut down a Tangipahoa Parish warehouse where Dean had evacuated nearly 850 residents of his seven nursing homes.
The Health Department took the patients away from Dean, placing them in other care facilities around the state, and blasted Dean for allowing conditions to slide so steeply. Seven patients have died, and around 50 have been hospitalized.
The scandal led the agency to permanently revoke licenses for Dean’s seven nursing homes and to open an investigation into how things went so wrong.
Attorney General Jeff Landry has also begun a probe, and a chorus of family members whose loved ones went through the ordeal are calling for criminal charges. Dean has mostly stayed out of sight in Georgia, recovering from oral surgery.
During the crisis Dean fired off a barrage of texts to Health Department officials, many of them laced with profanity, anger and threats.
Dean believes his system for evacuating several nursing homes to a single piece of property he owns – in this case, a warehouse – was a progressive approach that should be a model for others. He insists that he’s a victim of overzealous bureaucrats, who intervened without justification to move his nursing home residents to other facilities.
