A Wrongful Eviction From Gresham Nursing Home Led to Former Resident’s Death, Lawsuit Alleges

A Gresham nursing home is facing state regulatory sanctions and a $14 million lawsuit in the wake of a death of a former resident, Donald Price.

Price, 67, was a patient at Powell Valley Memory Care until September 2022, when he was sent to a hospital following a series of altercations with staff and residents. After he was discharged, the facility declined to allow him back, according to the lawsuit.

He was transferred to another nursing facility where he was treated much better, the lawsuit claims. But Price was “unable to bounce back” and died months later from multiple organ failures, which the lawsuit alleges were a result of his mistreatment at Powell Valley.

The lawsuit was filed on behalf of his wife in Multnomah County Circuit Court on March 21.

State regulators have already investigated the facility’s treatment of Price, ultimately levying a series of fines for substantiated evidence of abuse.

The lawsuit accuses Powell Valley of failing to “allocate appropriate staff to monitor and oversee decedent’s interaction with other residents and staff.”

Ultimately, Price was “improperly evicted,” the legal complaint alleges. “Powell Valley utilized sending decedent to the hospital as a pretext to remove him from the facility.”

Price was the only African American resident at the time of his hospitalization, the lawsuit states.

“These folks failed to follow the treatment plan. They failed to administer his medications. They egregiously failed to do the things they were contractually obligated to do. They botched it,” said the lawyer who filed the lawsuit, Bob Parker Jr. “And they botched it probably because he was the only person of color there.”

A facility representative said the owner, Trevor Wart, couldn’t be reached for comment. WW called the phone number on record for Wart’s company that owns the facility, but no one picked up or returned a voicemail.

Price was a former sandblaster and painter who grew up on Portland’s eastside. “He was the biggest sweetheart,” his wife, Rowena Price, tells WW. “He loved everybody.”

He was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 2015, she says. After many years of taking care of him, she brought Price to Powell Valley.

There, his condition worsened. According to an Oregon Department of Human Services investigation from last year, Price assaulted five different residents between July 25 and Sept. 30, 2022—a result of insufficient supervision that amounted to “abuse” of Price, according to a September 2023 report.

Other incidents troubled the facility during that period. In total, it was cited 11 times by regulators between 2020 and 2022 for substantiated allegations of neglect. It was fined each time for amounts up to $1,000.

Other problems discovered by the state licensing agency have been uncovered more recently. In January of this year, an employee discovered packs of pain medication had been tampered with. Inspectors later concluded 14 narcotic pain pills had been “diverted” from the facility and “replaced with other, unknown medication from an unknown source.”