Reporting Highlights:

  • Another Trump Pardon: Nursing home operator Joseph Schwartz was convicted of a $39 million fraud, but President Donald Trump pardoned him just three months into a three-year prison term.
  • A Troubling Pattern: Schwartz is one of several nursing home operators convicted of crimes who were granted clemency by Trump.
  • Devastated Families: The families of some patients in Schwartz’s nursing homes have been awarded millions of dollars from lawsuits. But they haven’t been able to collect from him.

Doris Coulson remained spirited even as her illness progressed — watching cooking shows on TV, working crossword puzzles and wheeling herself down the hallways of her nursing home to show off her granddaughter when she came to visit.

Coulson had been admitted to Hillview Post Acute and Rehabilitation Center in Little Rock, Arkansas, in January 2016, after Parkinson’s disease left her at risk of choking when she swallowed. That April, the facility’s operations were taken over by Skyline Healthcare, a New Jersey-based company that was buying up nursing homes across the country.

Medical records for the retired cardiac nurse, then 71, were marked “NPO” — nothing by mouth.

Then that September, a nursing assistant found Coulson unresponsive and hanging off the side of her bed, her skin ashy and her breathing shallow. She was taken to a hospital in a coma and died several days later. The chief cause of death was aspiration pneumonia, according to her death certificate.

“The doctors said they found scrambled eggs in her lungs,” said her daughter Melissa Coulson.

Coulson’s death and the circumstances surrounding it led her family to file a lawsuit against Skyline and its owner, the New Jersey businessman Joseph Schwartz, alleging that cost-cutting at Hillview left Coulson without the care she needed. It was one of several lawsuits tied to patient outcomes as Schwartz’s empire expanded and then unraveled, with much of the chain collapsing by 2018.

Schwartz didn’t contest the case, and a judge in 2020 awarded nearly $19 million in damages. Coulson’s family has never been able to collect. Schwartz had by that time relinquished all of his property in Arkansas, so there was nothing left in the state for the family’s lawyer to try to seize, nor was there enough information about assets he may hold in other states.

Coulson’s civil action was one of several efforts to hold Schwartz accountable for what happened at his nursing homes. In perhaps the most sweeping move, federal prosecutors in New Jersey charged Schwartz with orchestrating a $39 million payroll tax scheme connected to his nursing home empire.

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