Kamloops Seniors Village care home death ruled a homicide

For the third time in the past two years, the B.C. Coroners Service has declared a death at an Interior seniors' facility a homicide.

Emily Houston, 84, was attacked by a fellow resident of Kamloops Seniors Village who knocked her to the ground on July 15. She died ten days later in hospital from complications.

According to Carl Meadows, a senior director with Retirement Concepts which runs the home, nobody actually witnessed the attack.

"It was an unwitnessed assault... No one saw what happened," he said.

Kamloops RCMP investigated but determined the woman who had assaulted Houston did not have the mental capacity to support criminal charges.

The B.C. Coroners Office also investigated and concluded the death was a homicide, but noted in the report that the term homicide is "a neutral term that does not imply fault or blame."

Attacker suffered from dementia

Houston's daughter Nancy Bradley told CBC News the woman who hit her mother was suffering from dementia.

"She was punched and pushed into a metal doorway frame and suffered a complete break in her left hip. Her fingers were broken and her arm was all bruised up."

Bradley said she does not blame the dementia patient involved in the attack, because she simply wanted to return to her former room, which had been given to her mother.

But Bradley said she was given incomplete information from staff about what caused her mother's injuries and she was furious about the lack of detail.

Meadows said, because no one witnessed the attack, staff were not able to give Bradley much information at the time, but the coroner may have gathered more information.

Autonomy or lock-down?

Nevertheless Bradley is calling on seniors facilities across B.C. to increase staffing to prevent similar incidents.

Meadows said many of the patients at the care home have dementia and detailed care plans, and determining how much control to put them under, is difficult.

"Hindsight is 20-20 ... It is a balancing act right? At one end you want ro balance individual choice and autonomy, and at the other end you don't want to create a lock-down."

He said the facility has already increased surveillance, but also had to take residents' right to privacy into consideration.

In 2013 two seniors were killed in confrontations with other patients at seniors' homes in the region. One death occurred at Vernon's Polson Special Care Facility and another at the Overlander Extended Care facility in Kamloops.