Friday, November 30th 2012, 7:32 pm
Horrible torture of an elderly woman in a nursing home is caught on tape. The woman who committed the abuse has been tried and convicted.
Now, for the first time, we're allowed to see the secret tape that revealed the truth.
The video is hard to watch for anyone, but especially for the victim's three daughters. But they say this is proof, of why everyone should put a camera in the room, if they have a loved one in a nursing home.
The hidden camera video begins with nursing home aid Lucy Gakunga shoving latex gloves into the mouth of 96-year-old Eryetha Mayberry.
"Poor thing, helpless, it's just pathetic," said her daughter Doris Racher as she watched the video.
The tape goes on to show the two workers tapping Mayberry on the back of the head, taunting her, jerking her out of her wheelchair, then shoving her head to apparently get her to lay down.
"It's just something that we could have never imagined would have happened to her," said another daughter Earlene Adkisson.
This is the first time the three sisters have seen the tape, since they discovered the initial abuse.
"I think it's very sad that anybody would have to go through this, especially our mother," said daughter Sandra Cisper.
Mayberry had dementia, and couldn't remember what happened to her.
Her daughters originally put the camera in her mother's room at the Quail Creek nursing home because they suspected someone was stealing from her.
"Low and behold, this is what was on there," Racher said.
They never imagined they would find this.
"First time was horrible, horrible, I couldn't sleep that night," said Racher. "I think we all couldn't."
"Ms. Mayberry was a silent victim, nobody would have known this if it wasn't for this video camera," said Wes Bledsoe, with a Perfect cause, an advocate for nursing home reform.
Gakunga plead guilty to abuse and neglect by a caretaker and was sentenced to two years in jail.
The other worker Caroline Kaskea, a Nigerian citizen, is on the run.
Mayberry died five months ago. But advocates say the video gives her, and other possible victims a voice.
"Probably there are a lot of other people in nursing homes receiving this treatment," said Adkisson.
Bledsoe estimates there 24 to 62 thousand cases of abuse in Oklahoma Nursing homes every year.
November 30th, 2012
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