News or scare tactic?

October 30, 2006 8:23 AM

A good friend of mine spends each evening with her Mom in a nursing home. An aide told her that they had a staff meeting due to murders in Colorado (perhaps she has state wrong).

The aide said that a day shift for a nursing home came in to find the entire night shift murdered for the drugs that they had in the facility.
They announced they now are locking doors extra early, etc. due to the events that took place.

My girlfriend is now worried about the safety of her mom.
I can not find this event anywhere on line.
I tried to omit the state or that it was a nursing home (thought maybe some other type of facility) in my searching of the Google.
Can any one confirm this happened?
Are nursing home drugs really that good??

I would think some other places would be a better score.

posted by beccaj to Society & Culture (16 answers total)

1) I doubt her mom is in any more, or less danger than before. 2) It's seems dubious that the event even happened. I too can not find any reference to it, one would think multiple murders like that would make the wire. Perhaps someone got robbed but not murdered? Rumors tend to inflate stories.
3) There might be some serious painkillers
posted by edgeways at 8:45 AM on October 30, 2006

Like edgeways, I'd guess that painkillers are the target. Also, I think nursing homes would be considered a soft target compared to say a pharmacy or a hospital.
posted by Eekacat at 8:59 AM on October 30, 2006

Response by poster: I agree nursing home robberies must not be a problem and little to no danger to the patients (I am sure there are many more thefts due to staff - and more danger from staff).

But I advised her not to be worried and then she was wondering what kind of management would make something like this up or use an unsubstantiated report to base procedures on.
posted by beccaj at 9:17 AM on October 30, 2006

There are some sick minds out there. Those who would commit such a terrible act of homicide, and those who fabricate that kind of story. If it actually happened, the whole world would be aware of it. There could've been a narcotic robbery and people on the internet seem to always feel the necessity to embellish, some slightly, others to extreme.
posted by cjburton at 9:21 AM on October 30, 2006

I also can't find any reports of this happening. I was hoping that snopes.com would have a debunk of it, but it isn't there either. Every link I found seemed to indicate that the dangers in nursing homes were usually internal. Bad management and crazy nurses seem to be the biggest problems. Hopefully your friend has researched the home before putting her mother there and has some assurances that the employees are safe.

I would suggest that she make an appointment with the director to discuss the safety procedures just to put her mind at ease. If the murder story is a comlete fabrication, then the director would probably also want to know that his employees are needlessly scaring people.
posted by saffry at 9:22 AM on October 30, 2006 [1 favorite]

Beyond painkillers, there's other stuff that might have street value - valium, anti-depressants (xanax, prozac), needles and injection-related equipment. And it's all in a building that probably has minimal security, and where the residents are not going to be in any position to do anything to you.

That said, my gut feeling is that robbery is more likely, and an internal 'rerouting' of this stuff even more so.
posted by spaceman_spiff at 10:01 AM on October 30, 2006

Any place with drugs is a target. In my small hometown, doctors' homes got robbed (and/or got some substantial security) fairly regularly by dim bulbs assuming that's where the good drugs were kept. That, and the profitability of resold prescriptions medications "liberated" by staff, is why medical facilities should have a reasonable amount of security involved in the storage of their drugs. That way, killing the entire staff is pointless.

It's already pointless, though, because a bunch of poorly paid night attendants are not going to be all flinging themselves nobly in front of the diuretic shelves to stop a thief. They'll bag it up for you, if you've got a gun.

Either your friend is the kind of person who believes email forwards, or she isn't. The former is going to buy this story and pass it on and be scared because being scared is exciting and reinforces a philosophy that the world is a scary place. The latter ought to be storming the nursing home administration asking for proof, and if proof can't be provided they need to issue an apology for scaremongering and she needs to bear down and find out what their payoff is in propagating this story. Because there is one, and it's financial; nursing homes aren't run by people with big hearts.
posted by Lyn Never at 10:22 AM on October 30, 2006

This sounds like the kind of story you would read on an email forward. I follow the news pretty closely, and multiple homicides in a nursing home would make CNN's homepage, no sweat. Haven't seen anything. But you can't disprove that these things happen, so stories stick around and prey upon the risk-averse behaviors of modern society.
posted by ontic at 12:06 PM on October 30, 2006

Not to be totally sick, but in this (clearly made-up) story, it was the night staff that was murdered, not the nursing home residents. I've spent a lot of time in nursing homes, and I can almost guarantee patients would not be harmed in this type of scenario. For one thing, at nighttime, all the residents are tucked away in bed, most of them too drugged, immobile, confused, deaf, or blind to get out of bed to check out what was happening. Second, residents do not have access to any medications, so the pill-seeker would bother to try get any from residents - they don't have them.

So, even if this ridiculous scenario were to happen, it wouldn't be the residents in danger, just the staff.
posted by gatorae at 2:31 PM on October 30, 2006

would bother = wouldn't bother
posted by gatorae at 2:32 PM on October 30, 2006

This has vague urban legend all over it. Why would a thief need to murder the entire night staff? How would a thief intent on drugs even FIND the "entire" night staff -- secure the facility and then do room checks? If the thief murdered the entire staff, how they get into the locked pharmacy? (Er, whatever you call the room where you keep the meds.) Threatening a staffer with a gun would work just dandy and be less time-consuming and conspicuous, too.
posted by desuetude at 3:06 PM on October 30, 2006

how they get = how do they get
posted by desuetude at 3:07 PM on October 30, 2006

I remember seeing something about several nurses being murdered on an Unsolved Mysteries type show, tho I can't recall the details as to why or which show it aired on.

The murders took place in the 70's or early 80's. They were in a dorm type room well away from any patients, the event took place in the evening. I was unable to find anything about this story online.
posted by Sufi at 3:50 PM on October 30, 2006

Response by poster:
The nurses you speak of, Sufi, I THINK could be the Ted Bundy story??

Thanks everybody for your answers...I am always so sceptical, yet believe still that just about anything could happen (I mean a guy barracading himself in an Amish school with tape and KY?! some f-ed up things go on)....and before I said "no way- didnt happen" figured I'd ask Mefis. Thanks All !!
posted by beccaj at 4:12 PM on October 30, 2006

I suspect the nurses might be the Richard Speck story - he broke into a residence and murdered six student nurses, one of whom esaped by rolling under a bed. I'm a reader of true crime news and groups and I've never seen anything about a multiple murder of staff in a nursing home. I'm sure it wouldn't escape the eagle eye of the alt.true-crime denizens.
posted by andraste at 2:52 PM on October 31, 2006

Maybe they were running a scenario in their staff meeting or were referring to a scenario they were going to discuss. Oftentimes organizations that have safety concious security staff, etc will run hypothetical scenarios to give people a greater chance of responding based on training and rationale rather than emotion. That being said it sounds like a gruesome scenario and I think it would be awkward to run the night staff through the scenario without having morale issues! Also it seems as though this could be exagerated or altered based on the multiple layers through which the story has travelled. I would have your friend ask the facility for specifics. Oh and there have been no instances like this in Colorado lately or I would have read it in the paper!
posted by occidental at 8:29 PM on October 31, 2006