HOLLYWOOD, Fla. – Vendetta Craig said her 88-year-old mother has not been the same since Hurricane Irma.
Her mom, Edna Jefferson, was one of the patients who was inside the Rehabilitation Center at Hollywood Hills when the air conditioning failed during a power outage caused by the storm.
Several lawsuits have transpired after 11 of the 146 patients inside the facility lost their lives due to that failure.
The center has since been shut down and is under investigation.
Jefferson has now filed a law suit of her own against the facility which alleges that the center was negligent when it "failed to respond to the dangerous conditions that resulted in its facility and failed to appropriately respond to insure the safety of its residents."
"For our most precious possessions, our family, our parents our grandparents, they can’t handle that type of physical stress," Craig said. "The woman that I saw the Thursday before the storm she smiled, she had a glow and now when I see my mom she’s like a dazed state."
Jefferson is out of the hospital now and living at a new facility.
"It’s an international shame," Eugene Pettis, an attorney representing the family, said. "And to think that it's in my community. I'm born and raised here in Fort Lauderdale. It's embarrassing. It's beneath who we are as Floridians and it’s beneath who we are as human-beings."
