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Two sisters caught four care workers abusing their 89-year-old grandmother after hiding a camera in her bedroom.
Danielle Hinsley and her sister Rebecca became suspicious after Beryl Wall’s behaviour changed and she began to get bruises on her face and wrists.
Like a scene from the hugely popular Netflix drama Fool Me Once, they put a photo frame with a hidden camera in her room at a care home in Wolverhampton.
Four days of footage from February 2020 was enough to convict her attackers.
It caught the workers shouting in dementia sufferer Mrs Wall’s face, making fun of her, holding her legs in the air and hitting her in the face with a pillow.
Ame Tunkara, Morounranti Adefila, Danny Ohen and Bridget Aideyan were jailed at the end of 2023.
“Knowing they spent Christmas and new year away from their families is the best punishment,” Danielle said.
The sisters saw their grandmother regularly so quickly spotted her decline.
“We visited nan every day as this happened before lockdown,” Danielle said.
“Her behaviour had changed, she had bruises. So I went home and ordered a picture frame camera off Amazon and put a picture of me, my sister and my nan in it.”
It is the same type of camera millions of viewers have seen actress Michelle Keegan use in Fool Me Once, which is currently Netflix’s number one worldwide drama.
It is given to her to keep an eye on her daughter’s nanny, but captures more than she is expecting.
Naked and confused
When Danielle viewed the footage several days later, she said it “broke my heart”.
It captured the people who should have been caring for her most mocking Mrs Wall and pinching her face.
In much of the footage their grandmother was naked and confused, Danielle said.
The sisters took their evidence to the care home managers, the Care Quality Commission and West Midlands Police.
Three of the four workers were from an agency and one was a permanent member of staff.
Ohen was on his first shift at the home when he was caught on camera intimidating Mrs Wall and hitting her in the face with a pillow.
The family does not want to name the care home, which is under new management and whose other staff had been “amazing”, they said, caring for Mrs Wall until she died in October last year.
“We believe nan waited for the trial to end because she took a turn quite quickly when we told her the verdict,” Danielle said.
“She was my everything and always will be my everything.”
In total, eight care workers were charged for abusing Mrs Wall but only four were found guilty.
Tunkara, 33, of Walsall, and Adefila, 43, of Wolverhampton, were found guilty of ill-treatment and wilful neglect and sentenced in December to four months in prison.
Ohen, 39, and Aideyan, 49, both from Wolverhampton, were also found guilty of the same offences and sentenced to six months and four months, respectively.
Det Con Kathryn Sargent said Mrs Wall did “not have a voice” because of her dementia.
“Without the footage we wouldn’t have known it was going on let alone prove it happened,” she said.
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14 December 2023