Colchester – A local man who survived Oriental equine encephalitis and then COVID-19 has returned home after more than a year in rehab centers, where he claims he was neglected, abused and forced to attempt suicide.
In August 2019, Richard Pawulski was a healthy 42-year-old man and a successful physical therapist who had just moved into his dream home in Colchester with his wife, Malgorzata, and their teenage daughter, Amellia. He was doing work on a summer day when he was unknowingly bitten by a mosquito carrying the deadly Eastern equine encephalitis virus, commonly known as EEE.
Pawulski began to feel flu-like symptoms on August 22 and was soon taken to a hospital, where he slipped into a coma that lasted two months.
On October 1, the mystery of what made Pawulski ill was solved, but the prediction was bleak. Pawulski contracted the EEE virus, which infected his brain. Doctors said he would probably never wake up. His family was preparing for his funeral.
But miraculously, Pawulski did wake up. His occupational therapist calls him “a phenomenal miracle”.
Slowly but surely he began to walk and talk again. But he needed months of constant care. He was bedridden in hospitals and rehabilitation facilities for 16 months. When he was finally able to speak, he said he felt he had ‘gone through hell’ and ‘no one would wish that’.
Pawulski was one of four people who contracted the EEE virus in 2019 – and he is the only one who survived.
Just before Christmas 2020, Pawulski finally went home to Colchester and was reunited with his wife and daughter.
Although his family was very happy to finally have him at home, his return home was not the joyous occasion they expected.
Pawulski was due to be released from the Riverside Health and Rehabilitation Center in East Hartford in November, just in time for Thanksgiving, but the process was halted by red tape with home health insurance approvals. His release was pushed back and Richard was crushed. He had spent a whole year away from his family, isolated for months due to the COVID-19 pandemic – which also fought and beat the coronavirus last year – and he was ready to go home.
He wanted his life back.
While Pawulski waited for approval of the insurance in mid-November and early December, the chances of him coming home before Christmas grew slimmer and stole the sparkle of hope that Pawulski had left.
Then, one night, Pawulski said he denied the most basic human decency – the staff caring for him at Riverside allegedly refused to change his diaper. He repeatedly asked to be changed, not to have to sit uncomfortably in a dirty diaper so he could go to sleep. According to him, the staff mocked him for his weight and then ignored his pleas for help. They took away his call button so that he could not call for help, and they ordered him to return to his room when he entered the hall for help. From his room he heard them laughing.
And at that moment, Pawulski lost all hope. He said he grabbed his closet and pulled out a wire hanger. He loosens the hanger and fixes it. He wraps it around his neck and tries to end his life.
Pawulski was rescued by a staff member who eventually acknowledged his earlier call for help and was then transferred to Hartford Hospital. Malgorzata received a call that almost broke her heart. She was told that her husband, so close to home, had attempted suicide.
As she sat in her home in December holding her husband’s hand, her eyes watered with tears as her husband remembered the moment he tied the pendant around his neck.
“He just lost all hope,” she said.
When Malgorzata arrives at Hartford Hospital, she decides she will take him home. He would not return to Riverside.
“Why would we send him back to a place that made him die?” she said.
Pawulski was at Riverside from May to December 2020. During that time, he said he was repeatedly neglected, sitting for hours in dirty nappies, refusing access to telephones to talk to his family – even during the height of the COVID 19 pandemic, when visitors were not allowed . He said he was mocked by staff members who mocked him for his weight and told him that his wife was going to leave him because of his appearance.
Pawulski said his call button, his only way of indicating he needed help while confined to a wheelchair in which he could barely land alone, was taken away from him. His family complained that he needed a way to call for help, but they were never returned.
Towards the end of his stay, Pawulski said a male employee who worked the evening shift started hitting him and hitting him on his arms and body. His family still has photos on their phone of large yellow bruises on his body.
The Riverside administrator did not respond to repeated requests from The Day about Pawulski’s allegations of abuse and neglect.
The Connecticut Department of Public Health is still processing a public records request submitted by The Day requesting information on any cases of neglect reported to Riverside, or to Salmon Brook Rehabilitation and Nursing Center in Glastonbury, where Pawulski was before he moved to Riverside.
At Salmon Brook, Pawulski said he was never physically abused, but that he was just as neglected. The operator at Salmon Brook said she did not comment on his allegations of neglect or abuse.
During 2020, Pawulski’s wife and daughter said they were so desperate that they called police several times to ask for help and complain about neglect in both centers. Richard also called the police from the rehabilitation centers.
Lt. Joshua Litwin of the East Hartford Police Department said the department had a record made of one call about Pawulski’s care at Riverside. Litwin said Pawulski’s daughter called East Hartford police in the fall of 2020 and complained she could not reach her father. The dispatcher informed her that it was unfortunately not a police matter as there was no criminal charge and suggested that she contact the management of the facility.
Litwin said he had never heard of any criminal charges against Riverside in his 20 years at the police department.
Glastonbury Police Chief Marshall Porter said his department had no records of any calls alleging abuse or neglect at Salmon Brook.
Now that Richard is home, his wife and daughter say they are facing a new nightmare.
The family has been desperately trying for more than a month to get state approval to receive home care for Richard, who spends all day moving, eating and using the bathroom. His wife said approval delayed them because he left his rehabilitation program early. He was brought home early, she said, because he was so abused that he wanted to die.
His wife took a lot of time off from her job at Middlesex Hospital in Middletown. Her colleagues generously donated their paid time to her so she could take care of her husband.
But their time is short and they are frustrated. They said it was almost a full-time job for them to try to work with social workers and government officials to get approval for home care and SNAP benefits to help their expenses now that they have only one income. Amellia, a 10th grader at Bacon Academy School, often has to leave her virtual classes early, or skip them altogether, to place phone calls and help her dad if he needs anything.
They call social workers day by day, but got no answers, no relief.
“My family has never asked for help for anything,” Malgorzata said through tears in December. “We have always worked hard and taken care of ourselves, and when we need help, no one is there for us.”