Colchester – A local man who survived Eastern equine encephalitis and then COVID-19 has returned home after more than a year in rehabilitation centers, where he claims to have been neglected, assaulted and forced to commit suicide.
In August 2019, Richard Pawulski was a healthy 42-year-old man and successful physical therapist who had just moved to his dream home in Colchester with his wife Malgorzata and their teenage daughter Amellia. He was doing yard work one summer day when he was unknowingly bitten by a mosquito carrying the deadly Eastern Equine Encephalitis virus, commonly known as EEE.
Pawulski developed flu-like symptoms on August 22 and was soon taken to a hospital, where he fell into a coma that lasted two months.
On October 1, the mystery of what had made Pawulski sick was solved, but the prognosis was bleak. Pawulski had contracted the EEE virus, which had infected his brain. Doctors said he would probably never wake up. His family prepared for his funeral.
But miraculously, Pawulski woke up. His occupational therapist called him “a phenomenal miracle.”
Slowly but surely he started walking and talking again. But he needed months of constant care. He was bedridden in hospitals and rehabilitation centers for 16 months. When he was finally able to speak, he said he felt he had “gone through hell” and “no one would wish this.”
Pawulski was one of four people who contracted the EEE virus in 2019 – and he’s the only one to survive.
Just before Christmas 2020, Pawulski finally went home to Colchester and was reunited with his wife and daughter.
Although his family was overjoyed that he was finally home, his return home was not the joyous occasion they had 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 trial was halted due to red tape with home health insurance approvals. His release was pushed back and Richard was devastated. He’d been away from his family for a whole year, isolated for months from the COVID-19 pandemic – including battling and beating the coronavirus last spring – and was ready to go home.
He wanted his life back.
As Pawulski waited for the insurance to be approved in mid-November and early December, the likelihood of him coming home before Christmas was getting smaller, stealing the ray of hope Pawulski had left.
Then, one night, Pawulski said he found himself denied the most basic human decency – the staff in charge of caring for him at Riverside reportedly refused to change his diaper. He repeatedly asked to be changed so as not to be uncomfortably in a dirty diaper so that he could go to sleep. The staff, he said, mocked him for his weight and then ignored his requests for help. They had removed his call button so he couldn’t call for help, and they ordered him back to his room as he pulled into the hall for help. He heard them laugh from his room.
And at that moment Pawulski lost all hope. He said he stuck in his closet and took out a wire coat hanger. He unscrewed the hanger and straightened it. He wrapped it around his neck and tried to end his life.
Pawulski was rescued by a staff member who finally acknowledged his previous call for help, and he was then transferred to Hartford Hospital. Malgorzata received a call that almost broke her heart – she was told that her husband had attempted suicide so close to returning home.
When she held her husband’s hand at her home in December, her eyes watered as her husband remembered the moment he had tied the pendant around his neck.
“He just lost hope,” she said.
When Malgorzata arrived at Hartford Hospital, she decided she would take him home. He wouldn’t go back to Riverside.
“Why would we send him back to where he wanted to die?” she said.
Pawulski was at Riverside from May to December 2020. During that time, he said he was repeatedly neglected, spent hours in dirty diapers, denied access to phones 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 made fun of him for his weight and told him his wife was leaving him because of his appearance.
Pawulski said that his call button, his only way of signaling that he needed help while in a wheelchair that he could barely get into alone, had been taken from him. His family complained that he needed a way to call for help, but it was never returned, they said.
Towards the end of his stay, Pawulski said that a male worker who worked the evening shift started beating him and slapping him on the arms and body. His family still has pictures on their phones of big 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 request filed by The Day asking for information on cases of neglect reported to Riverside or Salmon Brook Rehabilitation and Nursing Center in Glastonbury, where Pawulski was before moving to Riverside.
At Salmon Brook, Pawulski said he was never physically abused, but just as often neglected. Salmon Brook’s operator said she had no comment on his allegations of neglect or abuse.
Throughout 2020, Pawulski’s wife and daughter said they were so desperate that they called the police several times asking for help and complaining about neglect in both centers. Richard also called the police from the rehab centers, they said.
Lieutenant Joshua Litwin of East Hartford Police said the department reported one phone call about Pawulski’s concern in Riverside. Litwin said Pawulski’s daughter called East Hartford police in the fall of 2020 complaining that she could not reach her father. The dispatcher told her it was unfortunately not a police issue as there was no criminal complaint and suggested contacting the facility management.
Litwin said he has never heard of criminal complaints about Riverside in his 20 years with the police.
Marshall Porter, Glastonbury Police Commissioner, said his department had no records of phone calls of abuse or neglect at Salmon Brook.
Now that Richard is home, his wife and daughter say they face a whole new nightmare.
For more than a month, the family has been desperately trying to get state permission to receive home care for Richard, who requires round-the-clock care to exercise, eat and use the bathroom. His wife said they have been told approval has been delayed because he left his rehab program prematurely. He was taken home early, she said, because he was so maltreated that he wanted to die.
His wife has taken a lot of time off from her job at Middlesex Hospital in Middletown. Her colleagues have generously donated their paid time off to her so that she can take care of her husband.
But they are running out of time and they are frustrated. They said it is 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 with their expenses now that they only have one income. Amellia, a 10th grader at Bacon Academy School, often has to leave her virtual classes early, or skip them altogether, to make phone calls and help her dad if he needs anything.
They call social workers day in, day out, but get no answer, no relief.
“My family has never asked for help anywhere,” Malgorzata said through tears in December. “We’ve always worked hard and took care of ourselves, and if we need help now, there’s no one for us.”