Sharon Hunt knew her son’s time was limited.
Already on disability and living in a Chicago care facility, John Sherman, 52, had just been diagnosed with terminal liver cancer. Hunt moved him to a new nursing home in Woodstock to be closer to her home in McHenry.
Still, when Hunt went to visit Sherman on a Saturday in September 2006 — his first full day at Woodstock Residence — he was in “good spirits,” and the mother and son spent hours chatting and laughing. She had no inkling it would be the last time they would speak face to face.
When she returned Sunday afternoon, she couldn’t wake him up. A nurse told Hunt her son had been given morphine for pain and “will come out of this,” Hunt said. But by Monday morning, he was being given last rites. By Monday evening, Sherman was dead.
Nearly five years later, Hunt relayed her account of her son’s rapid decline Thursday from the witness stand of a McHenry County courtroom, where a former nursing home supervisor is on trial on charges stemming from the suspicious deaths of Sherman and five other residents in 2006.
Authorities say Penny Whitlock, who is charged with criminal neglect and obstruction of justice, ignored suspicions raised by co-workers that a nurse at the home, Marty Himebaugh, was dispensing excessive doses of morphine.
Himebaugh, who is charged with criminal neglect and unlawful distribution of a controlled substance, is to be tried later.
Attorneys for Whitlock, 62, have argued that the case against her is based on hearsay and innuendo. They assert that there was no crime for Whitlock to overlook because Himebaugh herself committed no crime.
The defense’s strategy has also underscored the difficulty of proving the cause of death of nursing home residents who were elderly, seriously ill or both.
Under cross-examination by Whitlock attorney Nils von Keudell, Hunt broke down in tears and acknowledged her son’s death might have been the result of his liver cancer, not a criminal act.
Since the trial opened Tuesday, though, one former Woodstock Residence health care worker testified that Whitlock once called Himebaugh an “angel of death” but did nothing to investigate suspicions about Himebaugh.
Another former nursing home worker testified that Whitlock, her supervisor, seemed “unconcerned” when the subordinate told her that morphine bottles from a resident who had died appeared to have been tampered with.
The body of that patient, Virginia Cole, who died at age 78 on Sept. 10, 2006 — eight days before Sherman — was exhumed in 2007 after authorities began looking into the spate of questionable deaths.
Thursday, Cook County Medical Examiner Dr. Nancy Jones, who performed the autopsy on Cole, said the woman had suffered many ailments, but “none of them explain her dying when she did.”
Jones said she could not say definitively that a morphine overdose killed Cole because Cole had been prescribed morphine, and it was impossible to tell how much she had in her system when she died.
But Jones said the cause of death of another resident whose exhumed body she examined was more clear-cut.
Jones testified that while Alvin Rudsinski suffered an enlarged heart and dementia, morphine intoxication caused his death at Woodstock Residence in August 2006. She said the presence of morphine in his system was “unexpected” because there was no evidence that he had ever been prescribed the painkiller.
Investigators, more nursing home health care workers and relatives of residents who died at the nursing home are expected to take the stand after the trial resumes Monday.
If convicted, Whitlock could be sentenced to up to three years in prison, said Assistant State’s Attorney Phil Hiscock.
The nursing home has since been renamed Crossroads Care Center of Woodstock.
