BUCHAREST, Romania — After receiving distressed text messages from a young man worried about the conditions his friend was living in at a social care home in central Romania, Georgiana Pascu arranged an impromptu visit to inspect the facility.
“In the beginning, we were quite sure there is nothing there,” said Pascu, program manager at the Center for Legal Resources, a rights group. She said that a day earlier, state authorities had carried out an inspection of the care home for older and disabled people, and no issues had been flagged.
But what she and her colleagues uncovered at the care home in the village of Bardesti, she said, was “outrageous … inhuman.”
“There was a very young woman who looked malnourished, she didn’t move, she didn’t speak at all — she was lying on the basement floor,” she told The Associated Press. “There was another young woman, she was crying and asking for water.”
The nongovernmental organization discovered six residents in late July living in the Little House of Min’s cluttered, dingy basement surrounded by construction materials in addition to 23 people living on the floors above. Four residents with severe disabilities were lying on mattresses “soiled with feces, urine, and blood, with flies on them,” they said, who “couldn’t defend themselves and couldn’t ask for help.”
The team of three from the Center for Legal Resources immediately called the emergency services, and police and ambulance crews arrived, but even they called for backup, Pascu said. Hours later, a resident directed Pascu to what she describes as a small “secluded room … with just a bed inside” where two residents lived with “no artificial or natural light.”
The NGO’s findings triggered a judicial investigation and follow similar discoveries in other private institutions, which has so far forced two Cabinet members to resign over what Romanian media have dubbed the “horror homes” scandal.
The discovery is just the latest in a string of disturbing revelations that have made front-page news in the local media, spotlighting the impact corruption can have on the socially vulnerable in Romania, which joined the European Union member in 2007.
One of the main conditions of Romania’s accession to the EU was that it crack down on endemic corruption, but it remains one of the bloc’s most corrupt members, according to Transparency International.
In early July, police raids at three