Three former employees of a Miami-area nursing home where a dozen patients died of heat exposure after 2017's Hurricane Irma knocked out the facility's air conditioning were ordered held on bond on Tuesday.
The former employees of the now-closed Rehabilitation Center at Hollywood Hills, including its administrator, Jorge Carballo, made their first court appearances after surrendering to police at the Broward County Jail in nearby Fort Lauderdale on Monday.
Circuit Court Judge Jackie Powell set bond for Carballo, 61, and Sergo Colin, 45, the supervising nurse on duty at the time, at $90,000 each. Both face 12 counts of aggravated manslaughter by neglect of an elderly, disabled adult, jail records show.
Bond for another nurse who surrendered on Monday, Althia Meggie, 36, was set at $17,000. She is charged with two counts of manslaughter and two counts of evidence tampering.
A fourth defendant, Tamika Miller, also a nurse, was arrested in Miami on Saturday and is being held in Miami-Dade County jail, records show. It was not clear what charges she faces.
Police Chief Chris O'Brien of Hollywood, about 40 miles (64 km) north of Miami, was to discuss the case with news media later on Tuesday.
The arrests of the four follow a ruling by the Broward County coroner that the nursing home deaths were homicides, defense lawyers said.
The lawyers said their clients were innocent of criminal wrongdoing and did their best to care for the victims, all of them in frail health, under extremely difficult, unpredictable circumstances posed by a major natural disaster.
KILLER HEAT
David Frankel, one of the attorneys for the defendants, said most of the dead had been under hospice care, and that moving them would have proven medically risky.
The 12 victims, ranging in age from 57 to 99, were found to have died from heat exposure after being left with little or no air conditioning in the nursing home for days after Irma knocked out power to the facility's cooling system on Sept. 10, 2017.
A criminal investigation was launched almost immediately after the first deaths were reported in the aftermath of Irma, one of the most powerful Atlantic storms on record, which killed more than 80 people in the Caribbean and on the U.S. mainland.
City officials said the rehab center continued to operate without central air conditioning as daytime temperatures in the Miami area rose to 90 degrees Fahrenheit (32 degrees Celsius).
Portable air coolers and fans were placed throughout the building but were ineffective in curtailing the heat, authorities said.
An evacuation described by medical workers as chaotic was finally carried out on the third day after the storm, as residents in the overheated building began lapsing into cardiac arrest.
Of more than 140 patients who ultimately moved to an adjacent hospital, most were treated for respiratory distress, dehydration and other heat-related ailments, hospital officials said.
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