Notorious nursing home owner Bob Dean pleaded no contest Monday to 15 criminal charges in Tangipahoa Parish, including cruelty to the infirm, but he will not be required to serve time in prison for his decision to send 843 of his patients to an ill-equipped warehouse during Hurricane Ida in 2021.
Dean, 70, entered the plea in relation to eight counts of cruelty to the infirm, five counts of Medicaid fraud and two counts of obstruction of justice.
State Judge Brian Abels sentenced Dean to three years of probation and deferred a 20-year prison sentence. He also ordered Dean to pay more than $1 million in civil penalties to the state's Department of Justice and nearly $354,000 in restitution to the Louisiana Department of Health to reimburse Medicaid payments that he received while residents of his nursing homes were suffering at the warehouse.
The Louisiana Attorney General's Office, whose agents arrested Dean in 2022, disagreed with the judge's decision not to send Dean to prison.
“Our prosecutors urged that Mr. Dean be held accountable for his conduct, which led to the deaths of numerous elderly individuals," said Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill in a statement Monday.
"We asked specifically that he be sentenced to a minimum of five years in prison, and not be given only probation," Murrill added. "I respect our judicial system, and that the judge has the ultimate discretion over the appropriate sentence, but I remain of the opinion that Dean should be serving prison time.”
Dean's attorney, J. Garrison Jordan, said he believed probation was the proper sentence. He and a spokesperson for the AG's office both said the decision for Dean to plead no contest was not part of a negotiated deal.
“The matter is resolved," Jordan said by phone. "We think it was a fair disposition of the case and everybody has closure."
Dean was arrested after a 10-month-long criminal investigation into his actions during the warehouse evacuation in Independence, which culminated with Dean being booked in the Tangipahoa Parish Prison and facing a $350,000 bail in 2022. Many nursing home residents died after the evacuation, and coroners deemed five of those deaths to be storm-related.
Dean ignored warnings, arrest documents said
Dean's arrest affidavit showed that some of Dean's staffers tried to warn him that conditions at the warehouse were going downhill: Residents were developing infections and trash was piling up. But the arrest documents showed that Dean ignored them, telling them instead not to transfer out patients.
The residents, already frail, grew worse during their stays at the warehouse — a former pesticide plant.
One resident, for example, was placed in a hospital bed without side rails at the warehouse. After she fell out of it, she went to the hospital, where she was diagnosed with sepsis, blood clots in both legs and a chin hematoma. She died weeks later.
Another resident did not receive diabetes medicine or have her blood sugar checked at the warehouse. She developed gangrene and required an amputation. A third patient was forced to lie on a cot in her excrement and urine while at the warehouse; once she was hospitalized afterward, medical staff found a severe pressure sore on her buttock along with cellulitis and blood clots.
State officials shut down the warehouse after Dean told inspectors to leave the property. Meanwhile, arrest documents said that Dean billed Medicaid for reimbursement of various services rendered at the warehouse, despite those residents suffering without medical care.
Dean's sentencing was far lighter than the maximum penalties he potentially faced.
The state's "cruelty to persons with infirmities" statute carries a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison with hard labor on each count. Dean could have faced 80 years in prison on those charges alone: 10 years for each of the eight nursing home residents whose stories are outlined in his arrest documents.
The last nursing home owners in Louisiana to have faced such serious charges were the owners of St. Rita's Nursing Home in St. Bernard Parish, who were arrested on dozens of counts of cruelty to the infirm and negligent homicide after Hurricane Katrina. Floodwaters swept through their nursing home, and 35 residents drowned. A jury acquitted them in 2007.
Dean still on the hook in civil cases
In addition to the criminal case, Dean has faced a series of civil lawsuits.
A state judge in Jefferson Parish in late 2022 approved a settlement of about $12 million in Dean's insurance proceeds to pay out former nursing home residents and their families under a class action. Families are still waiting on those payments.
When Ida struck, Dean was deeply in debt on loans and lines of credit backed by his nursing homes, records show.
A federal judge last year rendered a $31 million judgment against Dean in favor of his largest lender, Investar. In June, Investar lodged an involuntary bankruptcy filing against Dean, who is fighting it in court.
Dean and the federal government both say they reached a deal to settle a January 2023 complaint alleging Dean violated Federal Housing Administration rules. The agreement calls for Dean to pay $1.58 million by next January to settle an $8.2 million judgment. It’s unclear where Dean will come up with that money.
Rusty Knight, the special master overseeing the class action in Jefferson Parish, wrote in a report Monday that Dean remains insolvent. He said Monday's plea in the criminal case won't directly affect the civil case.
"It does finally show some limited acceptance of responsibility on Mr. Dean’s part," Knight said.
Dean's lawyers have long claimed he suffers from dementia and exhibited a loss of inhibitions following dental surgery several months before Hurricane Ida.
Dean’s mental competency wasn't evaluated in a criminal setting, but his lawyers raised it in courts around the country, pointing to a diagnosis of “rapidly progressive dementia.”
A Georgia probate judge placed Dean under a temporary conservatorship in 2022, naming his then-wife, Karen Dean, to oversee his affairs. That conservatorship dissolved, however, as did their marriage last year.
