Petaluma memory care facility hastened woman’s decline, daughter says

A New Jersey native, Theresa Donahue spent most of her life in or near Newark before she moved to Sonoma County around 2015.

She came to California to be near her adult children, bringing with her the same vitality and joy that defined most of her life in back in New Jersey.

A struggle with dementia in her final years triggered a family decision to place her in a Petaluma memory care facility, a move that hastened her physical and mental decline, said Donahue’s daughter, Kellie Tennier of Sebastopol.

Donahue was raised in an Italian-American family and community. Her husband of 42 years, Dave Donahue, was a narcotics detective for the police department in Clark Township, southwest of Newark.

The two met as teenagers. He was her sister’s boyfriend’s best friend, and their first date began on the stoop of her house. As he walked up to the house, Theresa ran inside and made a lifelong declaration.

“She said, ‘I’m going to marry him,’” Tennier reflected. “My father was super good looking and she was very pretty. They had a great marriage. My mother would always say, ‘Your father put me on a pedestal and left me there.’”

Retirement was equally joyful for the couple. They had a summer house on the Jersey shore, where they spent a lot of time with family and friends, often going to the casinos in Atlantic City.

After her husband died of a heart attack at 59, Theresa Donahue, who was 57, embraced her role as family matriarch, again with humor and joy, keeping busy with friends and her grandchildren and extended family.

“She was very funny. She loved to dance. She loved to sing. She was just a fantastic mom,” Tennier said.

That’s how Donahue entered MuirWoods Memory Care on July 12, 2020. Tennier has a video of her mother dancing in her kitchen about a year before she entered MuirWoods.

“She was happy when she went in,” Tennier said, adding that her mother quickly befriended her roommate, who she knew as “Pat” and who used a wheelchair to get around.

“From what MuirWoods told me they were inseparable, they did everything together, Tennier said. “My mom would push her everywhere, they had tea, breakfast everything together.”

Every time Tennier visited her mother outside the facility, Doahue’s roommate was with her, in her wheelchair.

“They laughed a lot together, they had a sweet friendship,” Tennier said in an email. “If I brought my mother food, I brought some for Pat as well. I’d ask Pat about her family and she told me her son lived nearby. We would have nice conversations.”

Then, sometime in fall 2020, Tennier noticed that the roommate was gone. She asked where the woman was and her mother said her friend had broken her hip in a fall.

Pat was out for 3 months or more, Tennier said. When she returned she was nothing like she was before her fall. It was after November, when COVID restrictions ended and family members were allowed back into the facility.

“She didn’t know who my mother was,” Tennier said. “I’d see Pat in the hallways in her wheelchair making whistling noises. It was very sad to she the drastic change in her.”

Tennier said her mother’s demeanor changed after that. Over the course of days and weeks, Donahue “started declining. I could see her not as happy, she just looked different to me.”

Tennier said “little by little” she began noticing signs of neglect and inadequate staffing at the facility. Those signs would eventually form the basis of a lawsuit against the facility that resulted in one of the largest jury awards in Sonoma County in recent memory.

“I wasn’t defensive when I went in there, you trust these people,” Tennier said. “Little by little, things started piling up. I saw her bed dirty, her room dirty, she was dirty. She wasn't washed. Her clothes were dirty. You just start seeing this pattern … and then she kept falling.”

Within the span of just over two months, Donahue fell four times. The last two falls were only two days apart.

Donahue fractured her hip as a result of the final fall on March 20, 2021. Her condition deteriorated quickly, and she died less than a year later, according to a lawsuit filed by her family a couple of weeks after the fourth fall.

Donahue, according to the lawsuit, “became bedbound, was unable to walk, required increased assistance with all of her activities of daily living since the incident, and required 24-hour caregivers to assist her and encourage her with her (basic daily needs).”

In April, a jury awarded Donahue’s family $20.5 million, including $17 million in punitive damages.

Tennier tries not to think about what-ifs. What if she had placed her mother in a different facility or a smaller board-and-care home?

“I kind of shut that down. I can’t think about … I can … but I don’t want to go there,” she said, her voice faltering.

You can reach Staff Writer Martin Espinoza at 707-521-5213 or martin.espinoza@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @pressreno.