Carer Guilty Of Ill Treating Man

A care assistant who covered an elderly dementia sufferer’s head with a plastic bag as a punishment has been convicted of ill treatment of a patient. Liudas Poderis, 35, attacked Stanley Kelly, 88, at Southfield nursing home in Wilmslow, Cheshire, last November.

Poderis, from Lithuania, was told by a judge at Chester Crown Court to expect a severe jail term when he is sentenced on 3 September. He was remanded in custody and will be sentenced at Liverpool Crown Court.

Judge David Boulton, summing up after the two-day trial, described the ill treatment as “particularly outrageous”. He said: “Because this is the gravest of breaches of trust and you have disgraced the caring profession you can expect something approaching the maximum sentence that Parliament allows.”

The court heard that fellow care assistant Dalia Zemaitiene, 45, was in the room at the time of the attack on Mr Kelly. Poderis, of Handforth, Cheshire, locked the door and suffocated the pensioner for up to one minute with a carrier bag.

Mrs Zemaitiene said when she forced him to remove the bag the victim looked like a goldfish fighting for life. Poderis – who claimed the allegation was malicious – laughed and said Mr Kelly was an animal who refused to obey him and ought to be punished, she told the court.

On Thursday, the jury took less than an hour to convict Poderis, who trained as a doctor in Lithuania and came to the UK in 1995.

Speaking outside the court, Mr Kelly’s daughter Mary Jane Bloor, 52, said: “What this despicable man did was cruel and unforgivable. We feel let down by both the care home and the system that this type of abuse can have taken place. If more people had the courage to report incidents such as this, the standards in care homes would be greatly improve. My dad is the kindest, gentlest man anybody could have wished to meet and he could have done nobody any harm.”

Mr Kelly, who is married to Jane, 82, continues to live at Southfield Manor Nursing Home.