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When a Charleston facility fails someone you love through abuse or neglect, we help your family hold it accountable.
Most families who call us start the same way. Something felt off on the last visit, and they have spent the days since wondering whether they are overreacting. A parent seemed thinner. A bruise had no story behind it. Nobody answered the call light. If you are the adult child who signed the admission papers, that worry usually arrives mixed with guilt. You are not overreacting, and the guilt belongs to whoever failed to deliver the care your family was paying for.
Schiller and Hamilton Law Firm represents Charleston families whose loved ones were hurt in nursing homes, assisted living communities, and memory care units around the Lowcountry. Our Charleston office is at 1629 Meeting Street Road. Call 843-350-5420 and talk it through with someone who will tell you plainly whether what you saw is worth pursuing. We work on a contingency fee basis, so there is no fee unless we recover for you.
Residents often cannot describe what is happening to them. Dementia, sedation, hearing loss, and a very real fear of making things harder on themselves all get in the way. So the people who notice are usually visitors, and what they notice is small at first.
Pressure sores sit near the top of the list. A bedsore on a heel, hip, or tailbone usually means someone was left in one position for hours at a stretch. So do falls that nobody can account for, bruises in the shape of a grip, and fractures discovered days after they happened. Sudden weight loss, cracked lips, sunken eyes, and dark urine can all point to meals and fluids that never reached the resident. Soiled bedding, a lingering smell, the same clothes on three visits running, and a small wound that keeps getting worse belong on the same list.
The quiet signs matter just as much. A parent who stops talking, flinches at a particular voice, or seems newly drowsy every afternoon may be telling you something. Unexpected sedation, missed doses, and a resident found wandering outside a secured unit are not personality changes. They are care failures, and they are worth asking about.
If someone is in danger right now, call 911. Otherwise, start with an examination by a doctor who does not work for the facility, so the injuries get described by someone with no reason to soften them. Ask for a copy of whatever that visit produces.
Then write things down while they are fresh. Dates, times, who was on the floor, what you asked for and who you asked, and what you were told. Photograph wounds, bedding, and the room, with a date on every picture. Request the care plan and the chart in writing, and keep a copy of the request itself.
South Carolina gives you more than one place to report, and you can use them all. For a licensed nursing home or residential care facility, the Long Term Care Ombudsman Program at the South Carolina Department on Aging takes the complaint at 1-800-868-9095, and state law keeps the resident’s identity confidential unless they consent. The Department of Public Health licenses and inspects these facilities and takes complaints at 1-800-922-6735 or through its online portal. Adult Protective Services at the Department of Social Services handles vulnerable adults in other settings. Reporting costs nothing and protects every resident on that hall.
By the time a family calls, the facility already knows. Its risk manager, its insurer, and often its defense counsel have been looking at the same incident from the other direction for weeks. Our job is to reach the paper before the paper gets tidy.
The records that decide these cases are specific ones. The care plan says what the facility promised to do and how often. The nursing notes and the medication administration record say what was actually done, and the gaps in them say a great deal. Wound assessments, weight logs, and intake and output sheets show a decline in slow motion. Incident and fall reports, plus the daily staffing assignment sheets, show who was working and how many residents each aide was covering. Punch records and agency invoices show whether the building was running short and for how long.
Short staffing is the root cause underneath most of what families see. One aide covering too many residents cannot turn everyone every two hours, cannot sit with a slow eater, and cannot answer every call light. We pull hiring and training files, prior state survey findings, and complaints the company already knew about, because a pattern is usually more persuasive than a single bad shift.
The building is rarely the whole answer. A Charleston area facility is often one entry in a chain, with an operating company, a separate property company, and a management company that sets the budget from somewhere else entirely.
That structure matters, because the decision that caused the harm is frequently made by someone your family never met. A staffing budget fixed above the administrator’s head, a hiring standard that let an unscreened caregiver through, or a refusal to replace a broken lift can all trace upward. Staffing agencies that supply undertrained workers can share responsibility, and an individual caregiver who struck or stole from a resident answers for that directly.
Working out who is on the hook changes what your family can actually recover, since each entity carries its own insurance and its own assets. We pull licensing filings, ownership records, and management contracts so the company that set the budget cannot hide behind the building that had to live within it.
Some families come to us after a funeral rather than after a visit. A death certificate reading sepsis, pneumonia, or failure to thrive can be accurate and still leave out how the resident got there. South Carolina law gives a family two separate claims, and they are usually brought together.
A wrongful death action, under South Carolina Code Section 15-51-10, is filed by the estate’s personal representative for the benefit of the statutory beneficiaries, normally the spouse and children. It addresses the family’s own loss, including grief, lost companionship, and funeral expenses. A survival action belongs to the estate and pursues what the resident themselves endured, the pain, the fear, and the medical bills, before they died.
Having this conversation while you are still planning a service is hard, and we do not rush it. If there is a records request or an autopsy decision that genuinely cannot wait, we will say so plainly. Everything else can hold until your family is ready.
South Carolina Code Section 15-3-530 sets a three year limit, and a missed deadline ends a strong case as completely as a weak one. For an injury, those three years generally run from the date of the injury, or from the point a family reasonably should have discovered the harm. If the resident dies, the clock on a wrongful death action runs from the date of death rather than from the neglect that caused it.
Shorter deadlines exist. A claim involving a government operated facility falls under the South Carolina Tort Claims Act, which can cut the window to as little as two years. And because the records that prove these cases sit with the other side, and because staff move on fast, the practical deadline is always earlier than the legal one. Call before you feel certain.
You can raise a complaint yourself, and sometimes that alone fixes a care problem. What a family cannot do alone is obtain the staffing records, read a chart against the standard of care, and hold a national operator to a deadline. That imbalance is the whole reason these cases are hard to win from the outside.
South Carolina follows modified comparative negligence, so a resident can still recover as long as their share of the fault is fifty percent or less, with the award reduced by that share. Expect the facility to argue that your mother was noncompliant, or that she got up when she had been told not to. A chart showing the fall risk was documented and the intervention was never delivered answers that argument.
Schiller and Hamilton Law Firm keeps a Charleston office at 1629 Meeting Street Road. We take these cases on a contingency fee basis, which means no retainer, no hourly bill, and no fee unless we recover. The first conversation is free and carries no obligation. Call 843-350-5420 and tell us what you saw. If it is not a case, we will tell you that too.
Nothing to start, and nothing hourly. The first consultation is free, and we handle these cases on a contingency fee basis, so a fee is owed only if we recover for your family. No one should have to weigh a legal bill against whether to look into what happened to a parent.
South Carolina Code Section 15-3-530 sets a three year limit, generally measured from the injury or from when the harm reasonably should have been discovered. If the resident died, the wrongful death clock runs from the date of death. Claims involving a government run facility follow the Tort Claims Act and a shorter window, so ask early rather than assume.
Not necessarily. These agreements are often enforced under the Federal Arbitration Act, but they can be challenged. In Arredondo v. SNH SE Ashley River Tenant, decided in 2021, the South Carolina Supreme Court declined to enforce one because the powers of attorney the daughter signed under did not give her authority to agree to arbitration. Bring the admission packet and we will read it.
Often several parties at once. The licensed operator, the management company that sets the staffing budget, a staffing agency that sent an unscreened worker, and an individual caregiver can each carry a share. Because short staffing drives so much of this harm, we look hard at who controlled the budget, not only at who happened to be on the floor that day.
A claim does not die with the resident. The estate’s personal representative can bring a wrongful death action for the family’s loss and a survival action for what your parent went through beforehand, and the two are normally filed together. The three year wrongful death clock runs from the date of death, and records can still be obtained afterward.
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