Nursing Home Nightmare: Guatemalan Aide Worker Sentenced for Raping Vulnerable Women in his Care

In August of 2017, Luis Gomez (58) was sentenced to 23 years behind bars after being found guilty of sexually assaulting women who at first were not believed by supervisors who apparently thought such a nice man could not commit such horrible acts on women with major disabilities or age-related dementia.

But, a jury ultimately believed the women (and police investigators); and much to my surprise, CNN did major investigative reporting on the North Carolina case in 2017.
The story is old (hat tip: Cristina) but the depth of reporting is pretty astounding and makes me wonder if CNN was once able to dig deeply into stories that have nothing to do with Donald Trump!
It is small town America and you think your elderly or infirm family members are safe, think again…..

Here is the news in August 2017 about Gomez’s conviction,

No one believed he would rape nursing home residents. Now he is going to prison

(CNN) At first, no one believed them when they said the charming, well-liked aide in the nursing home where they lived had raped them.
Claims like theirs are often dismissed as drug-induced hallucinations, signs of dementia or attempts by lonely residents to get attention. And even when the cases of nursing home residents get to court, they can fall apart when victims’ memories prove unreliable — or they are no longer alive to testify.
This time was different.

Read it all.
Now here is the earlier investigative reporting from CNN,

Six Women.
Three Nursing Homes.
And the Man Accused of Rape and Abuse

 
Many paragraphs down in the shocking story we learn more about Gomez who according to the time line of the story, spent more than 15 years working at various nursing facilities in and around Waynesville, NC.
It makes you wonder how many more women were sexually assaulted.
 

Sometime around his 40th birthday, Luis Gomez started a new life in an unlikely place.
Waynesville is a town of less than 10,000, a mix of lifelong residents and so-called halfbacks, retirees from the North who tried living in Florida, then ended up here, less than an hour from trendy Asheville, in the Great Smoky Mountains.
It’s also one of the whitest towns in the state.

The move was a big adjustment for Gomez, who’d come to the United States from Guatemala and spoke only Spanish.
“It was such a culture shock to him,” said Rob Burns, a close friend and neighbor. His first American home had been in New Jersey, he told Burns. There, Gomez told him, “my boss was Spanish, the place I worked was Spanish.” In Waynesville, he discovered, he would need to learn English “in a hurry.” So he enrolled in classes at a local community college.
It was the late 1990s, and a construction job building racks for warehouses had brought Gomez to Waynesville. Soon he learned of another opportunity: a program at the community college that would help him become a certified nursing assistant, or CNA. That likely sounded promising, given the aging population in the area and the handful of nursing facilities that dot the country roads in Waynesville and surrounding Haywood County.
After earning his certification in 2000, Gomez first worked as an in-home caregiver. Then he was hired by a nursing home at the base of a tree-covered hill called Autumn Care of Waynesville. During the next 15 or so years, he would bounce between Autumn Care and at least four other nursing homes, including the Brian Center.
Haywood County spans more than 500 square miles, but many of the facilities where Gomez worked are just a short drive from each other — and not far from his home in the heart of Waynesville.
As with any nursing assistant, Gomez was tasked with the most intimate of duties: bathing residents, taking them to the bathroom and changing their diapers. It’s unglamorous work that doesn’t pay much, but he seemed to enjoy his job.

Read the entire report here with graphic details of what was ultimately discovered about a man who shocked those who knew him only as a friendly, Bible-reading nice guy.

By the way, in the report about his sentencing, his attorney said if he was found innocent he would be returning “home to Guatemala.”

No mention is made of his immigration status, but I think we can surmise that he has been in the country illegally for at least two decades and now we get to pay for his care in prison for two more!
This post is filed in my ‘Violent Crime’ category, but I soon may have to separate out the stories involving violent crimes against vulnerable American women by illegal aliens and in some cases legal migrants welcomed to live among us.