The daughter of a Bermondsey woman in her nineties beaten to death in her care home by a mentally ill man 30 years her junior has demanded to know why he was housed there.
Eileen Dean, 93, was hit with a metal walking stick by Alexander Rawson, 63, on January 3, 2021 in Fieldside, a care home in Catford, in Lewisham and died soon after.
Rawson had previously been in Lewisham Hospital, first in the main part of the hospital, where he twice attacked staff, with a butter knife and scissors, and then in a psychiatric unit run by the South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust (SLaM).
At a meeting run by SLaM, a psychiatrist, Rawson’s social worker and a Fieldside staff member decided to move him into the care home, which caters for vulnerable people with dementia. Rawson was housed in the room next to Eileen. He told his partner several times he was scared and confused in text messages. He scared a Fieldside staff member by waving his stick at her and swearing. And less than two weeks after he moved in, he killed Eileen.
“She was a very happy person, she was hard-working all her life,” Eileen’s daughter Georgie Hempshaw said. “She loved life.” Eileen was born in Bermondsey and grew up in the Dockhead area, living through the Depression and the Blitz as a child. She worked in factories like Peek Freans on Drummond Road, and the Pearce Duff custard factory on Spa Road. Eileen eventually became a typist. She met her husband Charlie, got married and had three children, and eventually five grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.
Charlie died after some 40 years of marriage, at which point Georgie, the youngest of the three children, began looking after her mother. “It started out with me just caring for her, doing her garden, taking her to the hairdressers, things like that,” Georgie said. She was quite independent in those days. She enjoyed life.”
But eventually Georgie realised that her mother needed more help, and she found her a sheltered flat in Chislehurst, in the south-east London suburbs, where she lived for about ten years. It was while in this flat that Eileen was diagnosed with dementia. She managed to go on with support from her daughter and a local day centre where she would go three times a week.
When the lockdown happened these services stopped. “It was a horrible time – we were struggling to keep her going,” Georgie said. “Mum was going downhill fairly rapidly, because she wasn’t having any interaction. She would have passed away to be honest.”
Social services did an emergency assessment, deciding Eileen needed to be in a care home. Fieldside in Catford was one of two homes they were offered, because it needed to be a home that catered for dementia patients. Eileen moved in in June 2020.
“I’m very angry about it to be honest,” Georgie said. “I did all the due diligence I could. I went and met with the owner of the home. He promised to keep her safe, which obviously he didn’t. It was a let down, totally.
But at first Eileen seemed “like a different person” at Fieldside, buoyed by the fresh social contact she was having with her new neighbours. “She was so much more happy and content. She didn’t have to worry about anything, it was all laid on. She even met a little friend.
“I haven’t got any criticism of the staff. It was a nice place, they treated them like human beings.”
Eileen caught Covid over Christmas 2020 and was self-isolating, but was apparently asymptomatic. She was killed on the first Sunday of the new year.
“That night we had no inkling,” Georgie said. “We had police at the door in the early hours of the morning. They knocked at the door and said she had been attacked. We ran to the hospital, it was horrendous there because of Covid. Then I was given a list of all her injuries, I can’t tell you how many injuries she had. It was horrific.
“I didn’t even recognise my mum when I went to see her, I thought it was some other poor old lady. I had to look at her feet – she had quite distinctive toes.
“She shouldn’t have had to go through that, she should have been able to live out her last years peacefully.”
Georgie said she has run the gamut of emotions after her mother’s death, including guilt. “My counsellor said to me ‘you’ve got to stop doing that because if you keep blaming yourself you’re going to drive yourself mad’.
“It wasn’t something I’ve done, everything I did for my mum was out of love and keeping her safe. I’m angry at the institutions, I looked after my mum for the best part of 30 years. I kept her safe. And then you hand over that responsibility, you put your trust in a care home, an institution. And they let you down…
“I just feel we didn’t have a choice. No one said, ‘do you want this person living next to your mum?’”
Rawson has been found responsible by the Old Bailey for the death of Eileen, although because of his mental state he did not stand trial or enter a plea. He was sentenced in December last year to an indefinite hospital order.
Sixteen months on from her mother’s death, Georgie said it feels “like an open wound” to be still waiting for a safeguarding report from Lewisham Council and a report from the Care Quality Commission (CQC), which inspects care homes and hospitals.
The CQC did produce a report from an inspection of Fieldside about three weeks after Eileen’s death, but “found no evidence that people had been harmed” – while saying safety at the home needed improving. The CQC said it did not reference the killing because of the police investigation, which was ongoing at the time.
SLaM has shared a report with Georgie, but she said it was “a load of rubbish”.
Georgie said she wanted to know more about the decision-making process that led to Rawson being moved into Fieldside. “I don’t understand how the care home said that they could deal with him. Did they know about his aggressiveness?” The Ladywell unit of Lewisham Hospital, where Rawson was treated before being moved to Fieldside, was described as “not fit for purpose” by the CQC in its latest inspection of SLaM in August 2021. In several wards in the unit, “there was not enough individual psychology support for patients,” the report said.
As horrific as Rawson’s killing of Eileen was, Georgie said she sometimes thinks about how it could have been even worse. “What if he’d gone on a rampage and killed four others?”
We reported this week on how at least 50 current or former SLaM patients have killed people between 2003 and 2018, although it is unclear how this compares with other mental health trusts, given the lack of publicly available data.
Referencing the story of Maureen and Edward Watkins from last week, Georgie said: “I just think these deaths are happening because no one’s joining the dots.”
The Watkins family demanded that SLaM change its working practices to make sure that terrible incidents like theirs, when Edward killed his 75-year-old mother Maureen just days after being discharged from the Maudsley, are not repeated.
Georgie said that she wanted to know how often SLaM is discharging its patients into the care sector.
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“It feels like everyone is standing back and waiting for us to disappear. If there’s not people like us banging at the door of these institutions saying hold on I want to know why this happened, it’s going to keep going on. Some other poor old lady or poor old man is going to suffer…
“If we all stand together and say this happened to my parents, this happened to my brother, this happened to my aunt, maybe we can stop this from happening. I just don’t want it to happen to anyone else.”
Despite being downgraded to ‘requires improvement’ by CQC for safety and leadership, Fieldside says on its website that it “meets all external ratings with a high standard”. The News asked Fieldside via email for details on the decision-making process of taking in Rawson, if it was still taking on patients from SLaM, and what lessons it has learned from Eileen’s death. The care home did not respond. Reached via telephone, the manager said she could not answer the queries because the director of the home was on holiday.
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CQC said: “After we were notified Eileen Dean had died after being attacked by another resident at Fieldside Care Home, Catford, we inspected the service to assess the standards of care it provided to people. We found there were areas the service needed to improve to ensure it was taking all reasonable steps to ensure people’s safety, but we did not find its residents were at immediate risk of harm.
“Our condolences are with Mrs Dean’s family and we continue to monitor the service closely to ensure people receive standards of care to which they have a right to expect.
The News also asked SLaM what the decision making process was that allowed Rawson to be placed in the home, but the trust refused to comment saying a report would soon be made available.