00:00 Four Minutes of Terror: Dementia Patient Dies After Caregiver Assault
02:02 Caregiver Who Denied Charges Changes Story After CCTV Footage Released
03:40 Why Does Abuse in Elderly Care Facilities Keep Happening?


1. Four Minutes of Terror: Dementia Patient Dies After Caregiver Assault
In mid-November of last year, an incident occurred at a nursing home in Gunpo, Gyeonggi Province, where a caregiver in their 60s assaulted an elderly resident in their 80s. CCTV footage from inside the facility shows the caregiver pressing down on the resident's neck, kicking their body with a knee, and even striking their face with a slipper. The caregiver also slapped the resident, twisted their arm behind their back, and shoved them onto a bed. The assault took place in a multi-occupancy room, not a private one, meaning the caregiver committed these humiliating acts of violence in front of others, regardless of the residents' dementia. It appears the caregiver, who had approached the resident to shave them ahead of a scheduled family visit the next day, became enraged when the resident resisted out of surprise at the sudden movement of the razor. The caregiver did not report the assault to the nursing home. The victim passed away the following day, the very day the family visit was scheduled. The cause of death was identified as traumatic subdural hemorrhage, a type of brain hemorrhage where blood pools under the dura mater, the thin membrane covering the brain, due to external impact. It was the nursing home that reported the incident. When the resident did not come out of the bathroom for a long time, vomited, and sweated profusely—unlike their usual self—staff sent the resident to a hospital and checked the CCTV to see if they had eaten something wrong or fallen.

[Interview: Grandson of the victim: They went in to check two or three times because the resident had been in the bathroom for so long. I heard that one of the caregivers had to help them out because they were sweating so much.]

Upon reviewing the footage, they discovered four minutes of assault and reported it to the police. If they had not checked the CCTV, this abuse might have gone completely unnoticed.

2. Caregiver Who Denied Charges Changes Story After CCTV Footage Released
It is reported that the caregiver in their 60s consistently denied the charges throughout the police and prosecution investigations. The victim's family first saw the Defendant during the first trial. Before the CCTV footage was released, the caregiver vehemently denied hitting the resident. Once the footage was made public, the caregiver changed their story, claiming it was self-defense because the resident had hit them first. Finally, the caregiver argued that there was no causal link between the assault and the resident's death, claiming that the assault was not the cause of death. The court in the first trial rejected all of these claims.

[Interview: Grandson of the victim: It is a situation that makes me furious even if they apologized and begged for forgiveness, but because they acted that way (denying the charges), I felt an unbearable sense of rage.]

The court noted that there was clear evidence in the form of CCTV footage. While the resident did resist at times, the caregiver, who has a duty to protect the resident, went beyond self-defense and engaged in what appeared to be an act of venting anger. Furthermore, the court accepted the medical causal link based on the autopsy results, which showed that the resident had no underlying conditions that could have led to death and that such a traumatic subdural hemorrhage could not have occurred without external trauma. However, considering that the caregiver was a first-time offender and is in their 60s, the court sentenced them to four years in prison, half of the eight-year sentence requested by the prosecution for death resulting from injury.

3. Why Does Abuse in Elderly Care Facilities Keep Happening?
Can this incident be dismissed as a case of one ill-tempered caregiver assaulting an unlucky resident? Every year, 500 to 600 cases of abuse against the elderly occur in care facilities like nursing homes. If we include unreported cases, the actual number could be even higher. Why does this abuse keep repeating? First, the shortage of caregivers is a problem. Under current law, there must be one caregiver for every two residents. For example, if there are 10 residents, there should be five caregivers. One might think that five people caring for 10 is fine, but these five usually work in three shifts—day, evening, and night. Ultimately, this means only one or two people are caring for 10 residents per shift, creating a structure where abuse can easily go undetected. There are also practical issues. To control some elderly residents who are prone to aggressive behavior, nursing homes sometimes assign male caregivers. However, some caregivers have told us that in the field, there are instances where residents are taken to blind spots where CCTV cameras cannot see them to be assaulted. Therefore, experts argue that the fundamental solution is to increase the ratio of caregivers to residents so that the workload is not too heavy for a small number of staff and so that there are colleagues present to intervene if a problem occurs. For the elderly, who may have dementia now but were once active members of society who raised their children, they could never have imagined that they would be so helplessly assaulted in a nursing home and leave the world in such a way in their final years. This is why it is difficult to think of this as someone else's problem. No matter how healthy or wealthy we are now, we do not know how or when we will grow old and end up in a nursing home. We must reflect on whether we are well-prepared for this era, where dying well is just as important as living well.

Reported by Kim Min-jun | Produced by Faith | Video by Shin Jin-soo | Video Editing by Jang Yu-jin | Graphics by Lee Soo-min | Produced by SBS Digital News