Part 7: How Mustang Creek Estates Responded to Mom's Death

After Mom went to the ER, Mustang Creek sent her a small teddy bear wearing a T-shirt with a cutesy phrase about missing her. When he saw the bear in her ER room after she was moved to ICU after her heart stopped, Eric felt disgust. After the way the staff had ignored Mom's needs, been too "clueless" to realize there was a serious problem, failed to get medical attention when it was obvious she needed it (Rachel knew as early as Sunday), and actually expressed surprise that Ben called 911, the fact that they would send her such a meaningless thing in the face of their negligence sickened him. After she passed away, he took the teddy bear home and burned it in the fireplace, where he felt it belonged. He later texted images of the burning bear to Rachel to let her know that the "gift" was not wanted and was an affront to the family.

Ben tried to call and talk to Rachel, but she would not discuss what happened at any length. Ben was referred to Rick L, VP of Operations. Rick had no answers to Ben's explanations of what happened, and made one claim that was baffling, and an obvious falsehood. He claimed that the staff at Mustang Creek was unaware of Mom's baseline condition when she moved in, and therefore did not realize that her condition - the incoherence, the inability to stay awake or to communicate - was not normal! This was an inconceivable excuse, because Rachel S definitely knew Mom's condition, and staff had seen her acting "normal" for TWO DAYS at least - on Friday when she arrived, and on Saturday.And yet this was the best "excuse" he could come up with.

Later, Rick L changed his story. He made an entirely false claim, saying that Eric had been with Mom for several hours the morning of January 1st and had not said anything about being alarmed by Mom's condition. In fact, Eric had been at Dad's room, in another building, for about an hour, helping unpack boxes with things Dad needed. He called Rachel when there. Afterward, he stopped by Mom's room but had to get to an appointment. When he stopped by her room was when he saw her blackened, dried lips and sought out the staff member who was in charge, demanding to know what they had given her and asking if she'd been fed or given drink. He absolutely expressed dismay at Mom's condition, which is why he told the woman that Mom had a doctor's appointment in several days. He pointedly asked the woman why mom had changed so much in the last couple days. He then called Ben and told him to come over ASAP. Rick L completely misrepresented what happened (of course he was not present).

Rick was now claiming that Mom deteriorated rapidly that very day, in a matter of a couple hours. He said Mom had not shown signs of distress until then. He falsely claimed in an email to the family that no one had noticed a change in Mom's condition, which, if true, indicates that the staff were grossly incompetent, but it also ignores the fact that we had repeatedly asked the staff why Mom was sleeping all the time, which was NOT NORMAL AT ALL and the fact that the staff kept telling us they were giving her pain medication. It also dimisses the fact that Eric had called Rachel S. demanding to know what medications they were really giving Mom, because her condition the last few days was drastically abnormal. Suggesting that Mom had not noticeably changed over several days was inane and flew in the face of everything we had all witnessed. He said her speech was slurred the whole time she was there, but that was completely false. She did NOT have slurred speech when she arrived. Anyone who had been around her at Legacy would have told you that she talked a LOT, and very clearly, and sometimes loudly. When in rehab, she often complained that staff were not coming when she called them (but never claimed anyone hurt her, as she did at Mustang Creek); she engaged in conversation, and she called people on the phone. But, contrary to what Rick L claimed, she did not speak at all after Saturday night! Again, refer to the reports from Legacy at Willow Bend. Rick L obviously did not know anything but what staff had told him, which were distortions.

He also claimed that she had eaten and drank a little every day - but we know that she did not have adequate liquids for a couple days at least, and we did not witness her eating anything after Saturday night - when she was in the dining room, eating on her own. She also did not need help eating/feeding herself when she arrived, and when she as at Legacy Willow Bend, she was going to the dining room to eat three times a day, and feeding herself! If she had eaten and had something to drink every day, she would not have been severely dehydrated on January 1!

Rick L was not a witness and was relying solely on what others had told him, but Rachel knew very well that something was wrong with Mom. She had known Sunday that something was wrong - hence her telling Jenna on Monday that Mom was "worse than we realized."

Look at this text exchange between Ben and Jenna:

Indeed, Mustang Creek's representatives would not even acknowledge that Rachel had this conversation with Jenna.

Also, we knew that Mom could NOT have become so dehydrated so quickly. It was medically impossible. And the staff at the hospital made it very clear that Mom was severely dehydrated from inadequate liquid intake for as long as 48 hours. From this point, everything Mustang Creek tried to say in their defense was a lie - as we all knew because we were firsthand witnesses and had been there - and a direct contradiction of what the medical staff at Medical City Frisco told us. Rachel also denied having talked to Eric the morning of January 1.

Furious with the lies and distortions, Eric called and tried to talk to Rachel and Rick but only got their voicemails. He decried them - particularly Rachel - for the blatant falsehoods (Rick, again, was not a firsthand witness).

In the meantime, Dad had already been experiencing problems himself with discovering other ways Mustang Creek was not deliverying on their promises (they had made promises about how meals would be prepared and did not follow through with that, but this was much less significant than the false promises they made regarding Mom). Dad and the family decided he simply could not stay in this place, given how they had completely let us down with regard to Mom. So we decided he would move out immediately. We were fortunate to find an assisted living facility (HarborChase Plano) that felt horrible about what had happened at Mustang Creek who offered us a great deal for Dad to be able to move in there (they are a genuinely caring, honest group of people, by the way, who deliver on their promises).

Dad requested from Rachel that she refund the nearly $12,000 he had paid for his and Mom's moving in to Mustang Creek. But she did not respond to him.

Consequently, Eric texted Rick and Rachel and demanded that Dad be refunded his money ASAP or the family would sue MCE and go to the press.

Here are a series of texts that Eric sent first to Rachel and then to Rachel and Rick L. (Warning: there is some profanity in some of the messages, as Eric was very frustrated by Rick's false claims and Rachel's refusal to talk about the conversation she'd had with Jenna on the 30th.)

This alarmed Rick, clearly, as he sent an email to the family saying MCE was "concerned" by the text messages and the accusations Eric made.

Below is a screenshot of email communication between "Ben" and Rick after Rick emailed Ben and Jenna with his fallacious excuses based on falsehoods told by the staff.

Jenna also wrote Rick an email in response to his fallacious excuses. Here was what she wrote:

Notice what Jenna said at the end - "My 10 year old granddaughter could do a better job than that about noticing when someone is not their usual self..." Rick L and later Renee Ramsey kept making excuses that their staff were not medically licensed, but we never said they were. They WERE supposed to have sense enough to notice when something was wrong, and CALL THE NURSE at the very least - or 911!

At this point, when it became clear that Mustang Creek was not going to show any empathy for what had happened and definitely not apologize for any of their failings, and likely not refund Dad the enormouus amount of money he had paid to them, the family looked into hiring legal help.

We will go into more detail about this later, in Part 8, but we soon discovered an alarming and sad truth about personal injury and wrongful death cases in Texas. To sum it up, the current laws in Texas - passed by the legislature in the name of "tort reform" - require that negligence cases occuring in nursing homes, assisted living facilities, memory care facilities, etc. be categorized as "medical malpractice," even though such facilities don't all provide actual medical care. Indeed, assisted living facilities do *not* as a general rule provide medical care. The next thing is that the law put caps on medical malpractice damages. The cap is $250,000. That's it. Think about it. Again, we'll talk about this more later, but think about what this does to the whole category of medical malpractice. A lawsuit by itself could easily end up costing that much. Then, on top of the damages, there are endless hurdles that must be jumped over in order to follow through with a malpractice suit. Essentially, though, what these laws did was to provide a very nice cushion for medical providers - which ridiculously now includes nursing homes, assisted living facilities, etc.

One attorney explained it this way. Suppose a surgeon makes a huge mistake in a surgery and a patient ends up severely disabled or even dead due to negligence. The most the family could sue for would be $150,000, and only if certain conditions were met. But let's say that same surgeon is on his way home and hits a woman crossing the street where she had the right of way, and she dies. There is no cap on what her family could sue the surgeon for.

So, basically, almost no attorneys will take *any* medical malpractice case in Texas now.

It's not worth the time or the expense to them.

On January 7, 2020, Eric sent an email making a formal demand of the records that Mustang Creek kept on Mom.

On January 8, 2020, Ranee Ramsey, CEO and owner of Mustang Creek Estates, wrote an email to the family, and while she expressed token condolences on the loss of Mom, she expressed "dismay" and "concern" about the "allegations" the family had made, and claimed that her staff acted appropriately. She stated she was concerned about our repeated references to the lack of medical competence among the staff and said that their marketing materials clearly state they do not provide medical care. She also stated that since they are not a medical provider, they don't keep medical records but could forward residency records. However, inexplicably, she claimed that it would take some time for them to pull together those records. This seemed odd, given that she said they didn't have many records. (What she did not admit or address was the fact that assisted living facilities ARE required to keep records of medication management - but that brings up another issue we'll cover in Part 7 when we look at MCE's residency agreement.)

Renee's email demonstrated complete ignorance of how Mom had come to move to MCE and why we had chosen that facility to begin with, rather than another one - going back to the promises that Samantha and Rachel had made before we ever made the decision to move Mom there. Renee clearly had no knowledge of the promises that had been made - or perhaps she knew but did not care, because the MCE residency agreement, in a section that the family did not see because Mom and Dad were asked to sign it without any of the children present, states that no oral promises will be honored. In any event, she clearly had no knowledge of Mom's condition when she moved in, or even Mom's medical history and why she had left Legacy Willow Bend. Furthermore, her repeated excuse that the staff had no licensing begged the question... If Rachel had no medical knowledge, why in the world was she suggesting Mom should be evaluated for hospice care even though actual licensed care providers at Legacy Willow Bend not only said otherwise but said Mom was improving?? But again - Renee did not even touch on the subject of Rachel's discussion with Jenna, because to do so would acknowledge that Rachel knew something was wrong with Mom.

Also, she, as Rick L before her, did not seem to grasp that it did not take a nursing license or great medical knowledge to realize that Mom's condition had deteriorated when she was able to feed herself, speak plainly, and text and call on the phone upon moving in but after two days was unable to speak clearly, unable to stay awake, and unable to text or speak on the phone. She also did not acknowledge that the staff had kept telling us that they were giving her pain medications, which never made sense to us since her pain medications did not have any of those kinds of effects on her. She did not acknowledge that we had been promised, over and over, that if the staff noted anything unusual going on, they would tell us and call the nurse.

If the nurse had seen Mom, that nurse would have known something was wrong!

Even if some of the staff had not seen Mom until she was already deteriorating from the onset of the UTI, it was obvious that Rachel DID IN FACT KNOW Mom had changed significantly - because she had talked to Mom at Legacy the prior week, AND she had made a point of talking to Jenna on Monday, telling her Mom was in a worse condition than we thought. Yet, if Rachel had no medical knowledge, as Renee Ramsey suggested, why did she suggest Mom might need to be on hospice care INSTEAD OF SEEKING MEDICAL HELP??

Renee Ramsey's excuses that the staff were not medically trained or licensed was a red herring argument and an attempt to deflect from the reality that it did not take medical licensing to see that something was wrong with Mom, and the fact that the staff was supposed to notify a nurse or call 911 if something was wrong, and it was clear that something was wrong since Sunday. The family didn't realize it was a serious medical problem because the staff led them to believe they were doping Mom up to keep her sedated, but the staff should have known better - and Rachel S absolutely did know better because she knew what Mom was like before she came to MCE and she knew that Mom had declined significantly.

Renee also neglected to address the fact that Mom was in a building where residents were supposed to be receiving a higher level of care! Apparently, the reality is that even though they "market" their care levels as having different levels, where residents needing more care are placed in houses dedicated to such, none of the residents are treated any differently. Renee's excuses would imply that no one really gets more dedicated care at Mustang Creek Estates, regardless of what people pay for.

Finally, Renee said that she would be willing to refund Dad, but only if the family signed a non-disparagement agreement wherein we agreed not to tell anyone about what had happened. It became clear at this point that the main thing MCE cared about was their reputation rather than the truth about what happened with Mom.

She also claimed that her staff (presumedly Rachel and Rick) felt threatened because of the texts Eric had sent in which he said that he didn't think they cared about Mom dying, and in which he stated that their lies proved they had no honor, and by the photos he'd sent of the bear he'd burned. Apparently they didn't understand the simple message that Eric was disgusted by the empty show of concern after the way the staff had incompetently let Mom get worse and worse until she was almost gone.

At this point, though, knowing that Rachel had indeed known something was wrong and had made what was, in retrospecct, an incompetent recommendation that Mom be evaluated for hospice care, Eric felt as if Rachel was either incompetent, a liar, or a person who simply didn't care if Mom died. After all, if she passed away, the staff wouldn't have to deal with her anymore. That was how Eric felt, knowing what he did. Looking at all the facts, the blame was clearly pointing to staff such as Mikayla, who had seen Mom the first day, but more than anyone else, Rachel S. And rather than take the family seriously, Renee Ramsey and Rick L were simply taking the word of their staff at face value, not even considering that perhaps the staff were distorting the truth to cover their own failures. Renee and Rick wrote us with the attitude that they knew exactly what happened and could in no way be wrong., even though they had absolutely no firsthand knowledge.

One of the most insulting, offensive things to happen during this timeframe was that Mustang Creek Estates sent Ben a bill for JANUARY! Mom had passed away after being at MCE only a few days, and Dad had moved out after Mom died... Yet Mustang Creek had the gall to send Ben a bill for the following month (even though Ben was not EVER designated as a financially liable party).

Their explanation? We had not given 30 days notice, and according to their resident agreement, you have to give 30 days notice before leaving - EVEN IF THE RESIDENT PASSES AWAY.

Of course, Ben told them that NO ONE had any intention of paying such a bill.

At this point, the family felt they had no recourse, so they started leaving reviews online - on Google, on the BBB website (where we discovered, belatedly, that numerous other people have had horrible experiences with MCE), on Yelp, on Senioradvisor.com, on Caring.com, and other sites. We'll share what some of these reviews said in Part 6.

Before they started leaving reviews, MCE's rating on Google was 3 stars. After the family wrote reviews, the rating dropped to 2 stars.

On the night Eric returned to Mom's room in building A of MCE Frisco so that he could get the remainder of her things, when he finally left the building for the last time, he broke down crying loudly in the parking lot, and standing next to the U-Haul truck he'd rented, he faced the building and yelled out, "You killed my Mom!"

A woman was sitting in a parked car near the building, and she got out when she heard Eric. She went over to him, concerned, and asked him what had happened. He told her the story. She was horrified, but she told him she wasn't very surprised. She said her mother was a resident there, and that she no longer trusted the staff. She said she wanted to find another place for her mother but was trying to find somewhere she could afford. She told Eric that it had gotten so bad that she had to come every day to check up on her mother to make sure the staff were doing their jobs. She said the staff knew to expect her to show up, so she was keeping them on their toes. She didn't trust that they'd do what they were supposed to do if she didn't come every day. Eric told her that the family was going to start telling everyone what had happened, and told her that she should share her experience. The woman said she was so very sorry about what had happened.

After the family started leaving reviews, this woman apparently saw them and left a review of her own. The rating dropped even further.

At that point, employees of Mustang Creek started leaving glowing 5-star reviews to counter the negative reviews and bring the rating back up. Additionally, Rachel S's husband left a review.

This was in violation of Google's policy, which states that employees or family of employees cannot leave reviews of their workplace.

To read more about the reviews we left, as well as numerous other alarming reviews we found on the web, continue with the story.