True Care Living

A year after my mother was carelessly placed in True Care by the state, this place still haunts me and will continue to do so now that she is gone. My mother was placed at True Care Living, and what I witnessed firsthand when I visited was worse than anything I could have imagined. No human being at all deserves to live in the conditions I saw at True Care. The facility itself is rundown, unkempt, and deeply depressing. They hire people who are not trained to care for, and should not be in care of, vulnerable populations. When I arrived, the power was out, and I had to search for my mother’s belongings in the dark with a flashlight. Her room was no bigger than a walk-in closet, filthy, and looked more like a prison cell than a place of care. Hard old tile floor, institutional brick. Tiny. Cold. It did not look like anything advertised on line at all. It looked like a prison cell where I could see exactly why she was calling me crying every day, going nuts, on her way to a swift decline. Even the bed resembled something from a jail or military barracks. Days after my mother had been rushed to the hospital in septic shock, I found an old burger overturned on the floor of her room under the sorry bed with the rest of the meal, proving that staff had made no effort to clean or even check on her space while she was there or after. The truly horrifying part, beyond her being bullied, was that mother was dying of sepsis in that room, and it took me—over a thousand miles away to recognize something was wrong and call an ambulance. She was dying of sepsis and nobody in her vicinity noticed. Not a single staff member noticed or intervened while her blood pressure was so dangerously low that she was barely conscious. And yet, a staff member told me she had seemed “fine.” That level of neglect is beyond incompetence, it’s a failure of basic human decency. The hospital confirmed had I not called, it would have been fatal. True Care might claim that state licensing officials found no issues. But let’s be clear, LARA is not infallible. Just because a licensing bureau does not formally recognize abuse or neglect does not mean it isn’t happening. The reality is that vulnerable residents in facilities like this often have no one to advocate for them, and their voices go unheard. Licensing investigations often rely on surface-level interviews, not deep, independent investigations into day-to-day treatment. And the government leans toward protecting capital more than the individual, especially the vulnerable individual. My mother was in septic shock while under their care, and somehow no one at True Care Living noticed. What more proof does one need of their negligence? Even beyond the physical neglect, my mother’s concerns were dismissed, and when I tried to advocate for her, the CEO responded not with care or professionalism but with hostility. Rather than addressing valid concerns, he resorted to gaslighting, downplaying the issues, insults, and even calling my brother to demand that I “stop the letters” or my mother would have to leave. I couldn’t advocate for my mother without hostile retorts and the insistence if such advocacy continue, she would have to leave (thank goodness I insisted to the hospital she leave when I drove up and saw the awful place). He also preferred to talk to my mother’s son (who stole her rent money and got her in that predicament in the first place) rather than her, the person directly experiencing the situation, or me, another woman. That alone should tell you everything you need to know about how this facility operates. They don’t fix problems, and they silence those who speak out. No one should be forced to live in a place like True Care. If you care about your loved ones, keep them far away from this facility. It is only a warehouse for the vulnerable, not a place of care. And if you are considering placing someone here, I urge you to visit in person—see for yourself if this is where you would want to spend your final years. I did, and it was one of the most heartbreaking experiences of my life.