Five Years After Brick Woman's Death, Elder Abuse Bill Languishes

When Maureen Marzolla-Persi read the article about a Brick Township woman who told police she was hit at the nursing facility where she was staying, she leapt into action.

“I blasted that story to every single legislator in New Jersey,” Marzolla-Persi said, to remind them once more of the issue of elder abuse.

The Toms River woman has been in the situation that Debbie Noce and Alison Scioscia are in with their mother, Rosemarie Terlizzi, who suffered a significant bruise around her left eye the night before she was to be released from a nursing facility in Holmdel.

But Terlizzi’s daughters did something that Marzolla-Persi said she wishes she had been advised to do: call the police.

Five years ago, Marzolla-Persi’s mother, Peggy Marzolla, suffered significant injuries while she was a patient at Brandywine Senior Living on Jack Martin Boulevard. She was taken to Ocean Medical Center, just down the street, where doctors discovered she had a broken eye socket, a broken cheekbone, a broken jaw, a broken wrist, a badly bruised elbow, a gash on her left shin and welts on her back.

Peggy Marzolla died 65 days after she was taken to the hospital that night.

Persi said staff members at Brandywine said her mother had slipped on some powder in a bathroom and fallen backward -- an explanation she did not believe.

In the case of Rosemarie Terlizzi -- who is recovering at her home in Brick after she was released from CareOne at Holmdel, where she was supposed to be undergoing rehabilitation after spending much of the first two months of 2015 in the hospital battling the flu and urinary tract infections -- the staff at CareOne told Noce and Scioscia that their mother had somehow hit her face on the fax machine at the nurses station.

That differed from the official statement Terri Rufo, assistant administrator at Care One at Holmdel, gave in an email to the Patch: “Regarding this particular issue, however, we are comfortable with the investigation conducted by the local authorities which concluded there was no sign of a fall or assault with the patient in question. These findings are consistent with our own investigation.”

Holmdel police have issued a police report, but the investigation was not complete as of last week, according to sources familiar with the situation.

And state Department of Health officials told the Patch by email that CareOne at Holmdel was under investigation prior to the incident with Terlizzi over complaints the department had received.

For Marzolla-Persi, who first relayed her story in a 2012 Patch interview, trying to determine if her mother had been abused by staff at the facility was next to impossible, she said. Cases of elder abuse in New Jersey are referred to the little-known Office of the Ombudsman for the Institutionalized Elderly, which Persi said put her on a waiting list after she reported what she suspected was abuse against her mother.

The eventual investigation by the ombudsman’s office did not resut in any criminal charges in the Peggy Marzolla case, nor any sanctions against Brandywine. But the experience led Persi to mount a campaign in her mother’s name to stiffen state laws against elder abuse.

“I was a good girl; I did what they told me to do,” Marzolla-Persi, a former school principal who left her job to take care of her mother, who suffered from Alzheimer’s, for several years before the care became more than she could handle on her own. That meant contacting the ombudsman and going through those channels.

“I never thought of calling the police,” she said.

While both state and federal laws dictate that elder abuse constituting a crime must be reported to local law enforcement by facility staff, it first must be confirmed that a crime may have been committed before such reporting becomes mandatory – a determination that could be made by employees of the same facility where the alleged abuse took place.

John Indyk, director of governmental affairs for the Health Care Association of New Jersey, an industry group that represents health care facilities, in that 2012 interview said Peggy’s Law could mark the start of an era of “the boy who cried wolf” with regard to calls to law enforcement. Indyk said Peggy’s Law calls for mandatory, immediate reporting of the “abuse or exploitation” of residents, which could lead to nuisance calls to police departments.

“It says ‘abused or exploited,’ but there’s no mention of a crime,” Indyk said.

Indyk said current laws are sufficient to protect elderly patients, and facility staff are competent to determine whether a crime may have been committed before notifying authorities.

“We need to get the police in there making that determination,” Marzolla-Persi said.

Moreover, if medical personnel examine an elderly patient from a nursing home who shows signs of possible abuse, they are under no obligation to report it, a key aspect she wants to see changed.

“If a child shows signs of abuse, as an educator I was required to report it,” Marzolla-Persi said. ”If animals are abused, authorities can step in.

“People should be able to call 911 if they suspect abuse” of a senior citizen in a nursing facility, she said.

So she fights on for the bills that would become Peggy’s Law.

The bills -- S505 in the Senate and its Assembly companiion, A1187 -- were first introduced in 2011, then reintroduced in 2012 and again in January 2014. But since their introduction and referral to their corresponding committees -- Health and Senior Services in the Assembly and Health, Human Services and Senior Citizens in the Senate -- the bills have gone nowhere.

Marzolla-Persi said she has contacted the chairs of the committees -- Joseph Vitale is the chair of the Senate committee while Dr. Herb Conaway chairs the Assembly committee -- asking them to post the bills, to no avail. The inaction frustrates her, she said.

“Conaway has blocked me on his Facebook page,” she said. And other legistlators on the committees have been unresponsive.

A check of the Legislature’s schedule for this week gives no indication the bill will be heard this week, though both committees are due to meet. And she figures at this point, there’s no chance it will be heard before the summer recess, with budget hearings on tap. It may not be heard by the end of the year, she fears, meaning she will have to start over in 2016.

“I’m not going away,” Marzolla-Persi said. “I’m not giving up on this bill.”

You can follow her fight for the bill on Facebook: Peggy’s Law S505 and A1187 Peggy Marzolla.