A former assistant at a nursing home and senior living facility can receive unemployment benefits, even after he was fired and charged by police for stealing jewelry from a resident.
The ruling by an administrative law judge in Iowa came more than two months after Cottage Grove Place in Cedar Rapids suspended resident assistant Charles U. Wolfe.
Wolfe had worked at the facility for about six months when a resident he cared for reported nearly $30,000 of jewelry missing from her room, according to court records cited by the Iowa Capital Dispatch. The theft was reported to the Cedar Rapids Police Department, which identified Wolfe as a suspect and tracked down the stolen items at a pawn shop.
Cottage Grove first suspended Wolfe without pay, but fired him in April following his formal arrest on a charge of first-degree theft against an older individual.
Wolfe pursued a jobless benefits claim at a May 15 hearing before Administrative Law Judge Adrienne C. Williamson, who ruled in his favor in late June. She found that Cottage Grove failed to present evidence of Wolfe’s guilt at the hearing.
Police have said the company did not find evidence of the theft — items were likely taken from a pouch kept on the resident’s walker — on surveillance video. Police found that Wolfe had asked two women he knew to pawn the items.
Wolfe has pleaded not guilty to the felony and has a September court date scheduled.
Williamson’s ruling that an arrest in itself does not indicate misconduct isn’t the first surprising unemployment finding affecting skilled nursing providers. Many other questionable cases have also surfaced in Iowa.
In 2021, another judge hearing a case from Montrose, IA, allowed jobless benefits for a nurse who quit over alleged understaffing concerns at the nursing home where she’d worked for two years.
In October, 2021, the Iowa Legislature passed a law that guaranteed employees who were fired for refusing to get vaccinated “shall not be disqualified for (unemployment) benefits on account of such discharge.”
However, the law made no reference to employees who fail to comply with masking or testing requirements performing their jobs. Months later, an administrative law judge ruled that a nursing home cook who resigned after refusing to wear a face mask at work to prevent the spread of COVID-19 was not entitled to receive unemployment compensation.
The executive director of Cottage Grove Place on Wednesday declined to comment on the case there.
