SHELBY COUNTY — A Shelby County family is claiming the man in charge of their father was actually abusing him.
John Leese, a longtime Shelby County resident, was at Good Shepherd Village in Springfield after suffering a stroke.
“We cared for him at home for about three years,” John Leese II said. “He got to the point where he couldn’t sit up on his own.”
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In less than two weeks, the family claimed he went through so much.
John’s daughter, Kathy Leese, said she didn’t believe her father had a bath “the entire time he was there.”
Both Kathy and John II saw their father in that shape firsthand and are still horrified. They described to News Center 7′s Kayla McDermott that he had a bedsore that went all the way to the bone that was “full of gangrene” and bed bug bites on his toes.
The family believes Dr. Richard Darr is responsible.
“Dr. Darr yelled in the phone five times, yelled at me, and said, ‘Let him die,’” Kathy said.
The family added that a “Do Not Resuscitate” form was filed without their consent.
“I told him he was crazy and I’m going to the state medical board about this,” Kathy said.
Earlier this month, Darr permanently lost his medical license to practice in the State of Ohio. The decision to revoke his license came after an appeal to “keep that license in what became a 70-page report of wrongdoing involving his patients,” according to the Shelby County Sheriff’s Office.
Kathy and John II said this came too late to help their father, who died on a ventilator in 2019.
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“They refused to give him even ice chips and water. They wanted him to die,” Kathy said.
Now, the kids want change and they have Governor Mike DeWine’s support, who wrote them a handwritten note calling what happened to their father a “tragedy.”
The siblings said they got a letter from the Ohio Department of Health (ODH) that said they saw no evidence of abuse. They also claimed the letter referred to their dad as “James Leese” instead of John.
ODH’s letter is not stopping them from trying to keep abuse like this from happening to other families.
“We are trying to be the voice for so many who don’t have a voice,” Kathy said. “That’s the thing we want to do because we will not let my dad die in vain.”
On Monday, they spoke with Ohio U.S. Senator JD Vance’s office to try and take their father’s case to Washington D.C. to have a law made in memory of him and to protect the elderly.
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