Social Service Agency Seeks to Pull 2 Care Home Licenses

State officials are trying to revoke the licenses of two San Fernando Valley board and care homes, alleging that lack of supervision resulted in a fatal scalding at one home and repeated sexual assaults on a resident at the other.

The state Department of Social Services charged that an 88-year-old man died in May of burns he received while taking a shower unattended at the Sherwood Retirement Hotel in Northridge. It also charged that lack of supervision at the Gonzalez Family Home in Arleta was to blame for a resident’s alleged sexual attacks on a male resident over a six-month period last year.

In separate complaints filed late last year, the department did not disclose the residents’ identities. Los Angeles police identified the scalding victim as John Donahue.

A hearing has not been scheduled on the Sherwood case. Gladys Logreco, an official of a property management company that operates the 82-bed Sherwood home for the elderly, denied the state’s charges and said the home will contest them.

The Department of Social Services expects to revoke the Gonzalez license because that home has not responded to the state’s complaint, department spokeswoman Kathleen Norris said.

William Gonzalez, listed by the state as the proprietor of the Arleta home, could not be reached for comment.

The state agency said Donahue died in a hospital 15 days after he took a hot shower unattended at the Sherwood home, which has no relationship to the Sherwood Manor nursing home in Van Nuys. Donahue suffered second- and third-degree burns over 40% of his body, the Dec. 14 complaint said.

The Sherwood home failed to provide the necessary supervision to protect Donahue from being burned, Norris said.

“Even if the person hadn’t died, the seriousness of the negligence is grounds for revocation,” Norris said. “In a care home, people need supervision to shower and take care of themselves.”

Logreco denied that Donahue was burned at the home. She said he was hurt in a fall in his room and was found within minutes.

But Norris said state officials learned of the incident from Sherman Oaks Community Hospital, which treated Donahue.

According to a Los Angeles police report, Donahue entered the hospital’s burn ward on April 25 as a “victim of water burns,” said Officer Don Lawrence, a police spokesman. Donahue was treated with skin grafts but continued to deteriorate before dying on May 10, the report said. The report listed the board and care home as the location of Donahue’s original injury, the officer said.

Logreco maintained, “We provide 24-hour supervision. . . . We take good care of our people.”

Conditions at the Sherwood home are “perfectly all right,” resident Betty Porvin said Friday as she took time out from reading a book in the home’s well-kept lobby. “I have no complaints.”

In a Nov. 29 complaint, the Department of Social Services said a resident of the Gonzalez Family Home in Arleta repeatedly sexually assaulted another over a six-month period ending in late June, 1988.

The Gonzalez home, which cared for mentally handicapped adults, “failed to supervise clients to protect” the victim “from this ongoing violation of his personal rights,” the complaint said.

State action to revoke the licenses of residential care homes is relatively rare, Norris said. There are about 71,000 licensed facilities in the state, and in 1987, the most recent year for which statistics are available, the Department of Social Services revoked 329 licenses, she said.

“The most common thread through all of the actions that are taken for revocation is some form of abuse,” Norris said.