Arizona’s top attorney is asking a court to seize control of “the most notorious assisted living facility in Arizona” amid allegations of elder abuse and consumer fraud.
Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes filed the receivership request to remove the current owners of Heritage Village Assisted Living from control while a lawsuit against the assisted living and memory care community’s owners and leadership is pending.
Mayes said the actions were taken to make immediate changes in leadership and bring the community into compliance, to prevent the revocation of the community’s license to prevent the relocation of its 150 residents, and to assess and protect the financial health of the community.
“The vulnerable residents at Heritage Village face not only the danger of inadequate care and dangerous conditions, but also the danger of Heritage Village shutting down entirely because it lost its license,” Mayes said in a statement. “In the near term we are asking the court to bring in a receiver to run the facility correctly and ensure the residents receive the care they are paying for. Ultimately we will ask the court to find new owners for Heritage Village and permanently block the current owners from any future contact with vulnerable adults in Arizona.”
Investigations lead to legal actions
The Arizona Department of Health Services conducted a series of surveys of the community following news reports that identified dozens of violations and leading to a notice of intent by the state to revoke the community’s license on the grounds that the life, health or safety of residents was in “immediate danger,” according to court documents.
Those surveys found the Heritage Village did not report resident injuries resulting in hospitalization and did not provide caregiver training and maintain service documentation. The community also was cited for prescription medication violations, faulty door alarms, environmental hazards and lack of resident service plans, among other issues.
The attorney general’s office began an investigation into the community based on these state surveys and determined that 39 residents were unable to move without assistance, which violates state law for assisted living licensees. The attorney general alleged that Heritage Village produced 39 written certifications for bed-bound residents, with 31 of those certifications signed by three medical providers after the state demanded such records.
The attorney general’s lawsuit alleges that Madison Realty Companies LLC of Colorado and its owners, Gary Langendoen and Matthew Arnold, “sit at the center of a web of real estate entities controlling Heritage Village.” The suit also names the community’s medical director, Mohammad Munzer Nasser, and executive director, Melinda “Linde” Leibfried, as well as Ability Hospice, owned by Leibfried’s husband, Joseph Leibfried.
Mayes’ lawsuit states that communities such as Heritage Village should be run by qualified healthcare providers, “not real estate speculators.”
In the application for receivership, Mayes said that the Heritage Village ownership group appears to be in financial distress and that the “tangle of entities related to Heritage Village appear designed to allow the owners to move money around without proper controls.”
“The current Heritage Village ownership has repeatedly demonstrated their willingness to use a web of real entities, along with fake names of fake entities, in order to conceal the truth about their operations, their finances, and their past history of harm to Heritage Village residents,” the receivership application reads. “The owners cannot be trusted to tell the truth about how the business is structured, and should the state succeed in proving its claims, the truth will need to come out because the owners will be required to sell the facility.”
Mayes said that appointing a receiver would prevent ownership from “sandbagging” during discovering and taking steps to hide or transfer assets.
“Heritage Village is a mess, and the residents of the facility are paying the price with their health, their safety, their peace of mind, and sometimes with their lives,” Mayes concluded in the March 22 receivership filing.
Committed to change
A spokesman for Heritage Village told McKnight’s Senior Living that it continues to work with state regulators to correct deficiencies identified by inspectors, including tightening security, extending shifts to increase continuity of care and contracting with an on-site medical clinic. The company also indicated that it hired a nurse to serve as a wellness coordinator and provide oversight and training to caregivers and seven resident care coordinators with caregiver certification and medication-dispensing training.
“Since terminating the previous management company in mid-2022, the owners of Heritage Village have made and continue to make a number of substantive changes to the facility’s operations, management and personnel,” a company spokesperson said. “We respectfully disagree with the contention that the health and safety of any Heritage Village resident is at risk. We are fully committed to complying with the extensive laws and regulations impacting assisted living, and to ensuring that Heritage Village becomes a model for assisted living in the state of Arizona.”
In response to accusations related to the timing of certain documents required for nonambulatory residents, the spokesman said that the community receives a prospective resident’s medical records before admission and that a physician verifies that an assisted living community is an appropriate setting for that person.
“A secondary review document for some residents due to their health condition should have been completed at the time of their admission; any mistakes in that regard have since been remedied,” the community stated. “Heritage Village does not knowingly admit or house any resident that we cannot care for appropriately.”
A focus on assisted living
The actions follow an Arizona Republic articlce series launched in May about assisted living communities in the state; the series includes a searchable database of complaints against communities. Heritage Village also was at the center of a November Arizona Republic story on a “brutal rape” of a resident by an employee.
Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs (D) announced during her recent State of the State address her plan to advocate for a package of bills to ensure that long-term care facilities “cannot hide or erase their violation history.” The bill package also would increase fines, standardize inspections and establish standardized credentials for memory care.
Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ) raised the issue of safety and transparency concerns at Arizona assisted living communities during a US Senate Special Committee on Aging hearing in January that focused on safety, staffing and pricing in assisted living.
