Following a two-year period of remarkable growth, the quality of care at a Philadelphia nursing home allegedly plummeted, leading to allegations of nursing home neglect.

According to an article by The Inquirer, entrepreneur Charles-Edouard Gros bought four nursing home facilities in the Philadelphia area in 2014. Since his purchase of the nursing homes, profits have skyrocketed. One of Gros’ nursing homes, St. Francis Center for Rehabilitation & Healthcare, went from barely making a profit to being the second most profitable nursing home in the region.

Despite the remarkable growth seen by these nursing homes, monetary profit allegedly increased at the expense of quality of care. Last September, inspectors allegedly found evidence of nursing home neglect at the facility and subsequently revoked its license.

“This guy is just making a cast amount of money, and he did it by cutting staff,” said Toby Edelman, a senior attorney at the Center for Medicare Advocacy, speaking to The Inquirer. “There’s no question that if staff are cut, quality of care and quality of life for residents will decline.”

According to Pennsylvania Medicaid cost reports, overall employment at Gros’ facilities fell 17 percent after his acquisition. He also reportedly cut the number of registered nurses, with a total decrease of 46 percent in St. Francis’s registered nurses. Instead, Gros allegedly hired more licensed practical nurses (LPN) , whose employment increased by nine percent.

“LPNs, they don’t have as much training. They can’t do all the things registered nurses can do,” Edelman told The Inquirer. “So this is not a good thing to replace RNs with LPNs.”

St. Francis patients were reportedly suffering “extreme” conditions constituting nursing home neglect, as reported by state officials in January. The residents reportedly lacked sufficient care, wound care, and nursing care. At the time of the inspection last September, four St. Francis residents had died allegedly due to nursing home neglect.

One of the deceased patients, Lois C., died less than a week after the state revoked the facility’s license. Lois entered the home in November 2014 after a hip replacement and eventually died due to severe bed sores and infection.

“She went in there for rehab, and she never came out,” said Lois’ daughter Shirley B., speaking to The Inquirer. Shirley often visited her from her home in Los Angeles and allegedly noticed a decline in staffing during her visits. After her mother’s death, Shirley filed a lawsuit against the facility, aiming to hold them accountable for nursing home neglect.

In her nursing home neglect lawsuit, Shirley reports that Lois’ doctor ordered staff to change her position every two hours to help alleviate the pressure. That allegedly did not happen, causing the bed sores to progress until they reached the bone two weeks later.

“What I saw was boils and stuff all between her behind. It was just terrible. Stuff oozing out of there. There’s nowhere else to go but to the hospice, so they push you up, and roll you out the door,” Shirley said, recounting her last visit with her mother. “That was negligence. To me, it was murder. That’s how I look at it.”