SAN CLEMENTE : 4 Group Care Homes Shut After State Raid

Four board-and-care homes were shut down last week after state investigators reportedly found some residents bound and unbathed, the owner of the facilities said Sunday.

“The charges are 100% untrue,” said Ruth Zitnick, who owns San Pablos Homes Inc., a collection of former single-family residences remodeled into group care homes. “They put people out on the street and destroyed my business in one day.”

Twelve residents were moved either to other care facilities or to homes of relatives, said Ila Woodhull, one of Zitnick’s on-site managers.

State officials were unavailable Sunday.

However, Zitnick and Woodhull said that the state Department of Health Services had delivered a 54-page complaint Friday with allegations ranging from use of bed restraints to inadequate bathing and improper dispensing of medications.

Both denied the allegations and said that Zitnick successfully fought similar allegations at a state hearing last year.

“I think the state’s procedure is a tightly planned progression of smears and slurs,” Zitnick said.

Zitnick said state officials showed up Friday with police officers, comparing the action to a drug raid. She said operators of large nursing homes were pressuring the state to close facilities like hers.

“They think nursing homes represent a higher level of care, but the reverse is true,” Zitnick said.

She said she has a doctorate in human behavior and has been in nursing care for 20 years.

Relatives of residents who were moved out of Zitnick’s homes Friday rushed to her defense, saying that the state’s actions cause more harm than the board-and-care facilities’ alleged deficiencies.

“It was like a police state,” said Lynn Harris Hicks, who said her mother had been a resident of a Zitnick home for two years. “We were told that if we did not find a new place for her by the end of the day, we would be cited for negligence. It was horrible.”

Carolyn Dyke, whose grandmother was a resident until Friday, said: “I don’t announce my visits, and yet I’ve never had any complaint. They treated my grandmother like a queen.”

Woodhull said the homes employed about 10 people. She said the homes charged about $1,600 to $1,800 a month.