Louisiana Voice

Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry has ARRESTED nursing home owner Bob Dean on 15 felony counts of cruelty to persons with infirmities, Medicaid fraud and obstruction of justice.

The arrest is ostensibly for the evacuation of more than 800 residents from seven of his nursing homes in the wake of Hurricane Ida nearly a year ago to a warehouse in the Tangipahoa Parish town of Independence. That warehouse proved woefully inadequate to care for the elderly and frail patients, more than a dozen of whom died.

But the action by Landry, who is an officially unannounced but assumed Republican candidate for governor in the 2023 election, carries deep political overtones. The sheriff of Tangipahoa Parish is Daniel Edwards and the Independence police chief is Frank Edwards. Both men are brothers to Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards who has often been at political odds with Landry. The patriarch of the Edwards family, Frank Edwards, for whom the Independence police chief is named, was also sheriff of the parish.

The timing of Dean’s arrest and the certain legal maneuvers to come just as the political season heats up in Louisiana could prove to be a political embarrassment for the Edwards clan.

In early September 2021, only days after Hurricane Ida struck, 843 residents were removed from the warehouse, which had no air conditioning, no electricity, no oxygen concentrators, and no means by which to prepare food for the residents.

Seven deaths were immediately attributed to the ordeal and several subsequent deaths followed but both Sheriff Daniel Edwards and Police Chief Frank Edwards issued STATEMENTS that they did not intend to investigate the deaths, according to Landry.

In a statement to CNN, Sheriff Edwards said the case was “not connected to the Tangipahoa Parish Sheriff’s Office. It is under the purview of the Independence Police Department under Chief Frank Edwards.” But Police Chief Edwards told the network that his department was too small and lacked sufficient resources to investigate. Additionally, he said his office had been overwhelmed with recovery efforts following Ida.

The Louisiana Department of Hospitals (LDH) came under fire from LEGISLATORS who appeared a little to eager to shift the blame on LDH in their scramble to find a scapegoat for the debacle. And while the governor’s office was not directly involved, it all happened on Gov. Edwards’s watch and Landry obviously was chomping at the bit to embarrass his nemesis, or at least his brothers and by association, the governor himself, as the state moves into another election cycle.

It’s not like Daniel Edwards needed this for his department.

His office and that of the Hammond Police Department were RAIDED by the FBI in 2016 in connection with a federal investigation of a drug task force that saw deputy Johnny Domingue PLEAD GUILTY to three drug conspiracy charges and a single count of abuse of office. RELEASED in March 2019 after being given credit for 34 months he spent in jail awaiting trial, he found himself BACK IN JAIL three years later after his arrest for attempting to smuggle 8 kilos of cocaine into Houston in what was actually a sting operation.

A second deputy, Karl Newman, was sentenced to 42 months in prison in the same case which also took down a prominent DEA agent, Chad Scott.

And only last week, the Tangipahoa Sheriff’s Office came under fire again in a botched rape investigation that eventually saw a state judge award CUSTODY of the child from the encounter to the alleged rapist and the mother, the victim, ordered to pay child support.

It’s shaping up to be an interesting campaign already and nobody has even announced for a single office yet.

Surely, Landry would take the high road and choose not to make all this an issue in the campaign.