As a child, Amanda Coulson visited her mother at her job in a Little Rock, Arkansas hospital. Doris Coulson, a nurse, left one memory that her daughter could never forget. A code blue was announced, and suddenly her mother was sprinting beside a patient’s bed. “She leaped onto the middle of the bed and performed CPR as it sped down the hallway,” Amanda Coulson recounted years later in court. I realized she didn’t play at work all day. Her mother was that sort of caregiver: one who truly knew what quality care entailed, having devoted her life to providing it for others. Upon retiring, Doris Coulson became a resident at a nursing home owned by Joseph Schwartz, a New Jersey businessman acquiring facilities nationwide. The staff wasn’t allowed to give her solid food, but they did anyway, and it killed her. Doctors informed the family that they discovered scrambled eggs in her lungs. Nine years following Coulson’s death, President Donald Trump granted a pardon to Schwartz in a federal case where he had confessed to withholding $39 million in employee payroll taxes from his nursing home business and redirecting the funds elsewhere. Schwartz’s attorneys contended that his conduct aimed not at personal gain but at rescuing his business.
