Missing Patient Found, but Dies: Woman, Focus of 4-Day Search, Was in Nursing Home Storage Room
By David Perlmutt, The Charlotte Observer, N.C.
Jan. 28—- WCNC VIDEO:
A 66-year-old Alzheimer’s patient missing from an east Charlotte nursing home since Monday was found alive Friday in a storage room of the same facility, but later died at Presbyterian Hospital.
After staff members, police and others searched four days for Mary Cole, she was found under tables with her head resting on a pipe in a second-floor storage room at Liberty Nursing and Rehabilitation Center on Shamrock Drive, her daughter, Tammy Terry of Gastonia, said Friday.
Charlotte-Mecklenburg detectives were conducting a death investigation Friday, spokesman Keith Bridges said. It will involve issues including why the center didn’t keep the storage room locked and why Cole wasn’t found after six searches of the 289-bed facility, he said.
When she was found, Cole was dehydrated but had a heartbeat and pulse. She was rushed to Presbyterian, but died soon after arriving, Terry said.
Doctors told Terry they didn’t know why she died. The Mecklenburg County Medical Examiner’s Office will perform an autopsy.
Terry was clearly perplexed how her mother could have gone unnoticed in the storage room down the hall from her room for four days.
“The people in that nursing home were wonderful to us. They sat up all night with us. They searched from 7 a.m. to nightfall with us. They cried with us,” Terry said. “But I don’t understand why she wasn’t found.
“They told us they’d searched every nook and cranny of that place.”
Liberty administrator John Gryglewicz declined several requests for an interview. He faxed a short statement to the media, expressing the center’s sadness at “this loss,” and sympathy to Cole’s family.
Terry said her mother lived on the second floor. She walked the halls often and had apparently wandered into the storage room. A window in the room was open, and Terry believes her mother tried to climb through it to escape the center, but fell back into the room.
“She climbed through windows of other nursing homes, trying to escape,” Terry said.
Cole, born and raised in Batesville, Miss., was a dog groomer in Labell, Fla., before she got sick and Terry moved her to North Carolina.
Terry brought Cole to her home in Gastonia but soon realized she couldn’t properly care for her. Cole lived in three nursing homes — attempting to escape from each — before Terry brought her to Charlotte and admitted her into Liberty about two years ago.
At the end, her mother communicated on a level of “a 2- or 3-year-old,” Terry said.
Terry first learned of her mother’s disappearance Monday afternoon, when the search of woods and neighborhoods a half-mile around the facility was launched. After searchers found no sign of Cole, the search was extended another half-mile on Thursday.
Two of Cole’s sons flew in from Florida and Nebraska, to join Terry and another son from Bessemer City in the search.
They were helped by dozens of strangers, including police and nearby neighbors. “We met so many nice people of many nationalities,” Terry said. “We are very grateful for all the help.”
Friday, they were sitting in the lobby when they heard a “code blue on the second floor” over the intercom.
Suddenly, staff members hustled the family to the elevator, telling them their mother had been found.
At the hospital, Terry tried to talk to her mother:
“I always told her when I’d leave her: ‘You’re the best mama in the world,’ ” Terry said. “I told her that again and asked her to wink if she understood me. Her brow got all wrinkled.”
Soon after that, Cole died.
Terry said she was sad but relieved that her mother had been found.
“Not knowing where she was, your mind starts to play tricks and you wonder did someone murder her, was she cold, or hungry,” Terry said. “This gives us closure. A lot of people don’t get that.” — Staff Writers Steve Lyttle and Cleve R. Wootson JR. COntributed.
— Reach David Perlmutt: (704) 358-5061.
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