SALT LAKE CITY — Two Salt Lake women are accused of neglecting their bed-ridden, elderly mother to such a degree that police saw maggots in her open wounds when they responded to the home.
Paula Leona Rhodes, 38, and Terry Gardner, 37, were charged Wednesday in 3rd District Court with aggravated abuse of a vulnerable adult, a third-degree felony.
On June 25, Salt Lake police were called to a residence where officers found a 71-year-old woman "lying in her feces with multiple wounds/bedsores on her body," according to charging documents.
The woman had "severe bedsores" as well as fecal matter "all over her body" and a gaping wound in her left hip where "the skin was so decayed that her femur was exposed," charging documents state. Other open wounds had "green pus, maggots and black flesh" around them, according to the charges.
Rhodes and Gardner, the victim's daughters, told police "it had been a few weeks" since they had given their mother a bath or cleaned her and that they were aware that maggots had been in her wounds for about a week, the charges state.