Missouri Personal Injury Lawyer Blog

One year later, the cause of a mentally ill nursing home resident's death remains a mystery, according to a recent article in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

One morning in the summer of 2009, the 46-year-old resident of the Normandy Nursing Center told employees at the nursing home that he wasn't feeling well. The resident did not eat his breakfast that morning and declined to take his medication. Later that day, a nursing home employee found the man sprawled across his bed. He had stopped breathing, and he was pronounced dead not long after.

Toxicology tests indicated that the resident had died of a morphine overdose. However, the resident had not been prescribed morphine or any other opiate pain medication and was not known to be a drug-seeker. The tests revealed three to four times the normal morphine dose in the resident's system, but tests on his liver indicated that he was not a long-term morphine user. Although police investigated both this resident's case and an incident two months later involving another resident who was found to have opiates in her system, the case remains a mystery.