Elderly Patients Victimized : Theft: A former nursing home official is accused of raiding trust accounts to buy items for people who were dead or too sick to use them.

The former administrator of a Long Beach nursing home was charged Wednesday with raiding patient trust accounts to buy lawn furniture, silk suits and lingerie in the names of elderly patients who were either dead or too sick to use them, authorities said.

Lynn Read of Long Beach, who was hired last May to run the South Bay Nursing Center on Pacific Coast Highway, was in charge of patient trust accounts set up to hold social security checks, pension funds and personal spending money, authorities said.

In less than two months, he allegedly spent as much as $15,000 on items the patients say they never saw, including two $400 silk suits--size 48--for an elderly man who weighed about 100 pounds.

“He bought a TV for a patient who had been dead for a month and a half,” said David Childress, an investigator with the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services, which regulates nursing homes in the county.

An arrest warrant was issued Wednesday by the district attorney’s office, but Read was not in custody when 30 counts of theft involving 23 patients were filed against him in Long Beach Municipal Court, authorities said.

Read, who came to Long Beach from Texas, was placed on administrative leave in June when officials at the 192-bed nursing home learned that an investigation was being conducted by the health department and the district attorney’s Nursing Home and Dependent Care Section, officials said.

A new administrator, Vic Marefka, was recently appointed to run the hospital. He was not available for comment Wednesday.

A monthlong review of the center’s trust account records was begun after the health department received a complaint of possible financial wrongdoing.