Little Rock, Arkansas — Doris Coulson was a retired nurse who understood, better than most, what real care looked like. She had spent her career providing it. When she became a patient herself at a nursing home owned by New Jersey businessman Joseph Schwartz, her family expected the same.
What they got instead was a death that should never have happened.
Staff fed Coulson solid food despite explicit medical orders prohibiting it. She died. An autopsy found scrambled eggs in her lungs.
Her family sued and eventually won a judgment of nearly $19 million. That was six years ago. They’ve never received a cent.
Now, a new ProPublica investigation makes clear why: the system built to hold Schwartz accountable kept failing the people he’d harmed — even after criminal convictions, civil judgments, and a presidential pardon.
Pardon, Then Prison, Then Gone
President Trump pardoned Schwartz in a federal case in which Schwartz had admitted to withholding $39 million in employee payroll taxes from his nursing home empire and diverting the money for other purposes. The White House called it “over prosecution” and said sending someone of his age and poor health to prison for three years wasn’t warranted.
What the White House didn’t say: behind the tax charge was a business that families, lawsuits, and court records described as having left real people neglected, injured, and dead across multiple states.
Schwartz still had to serve nine months in an Arkansas prison for a separate Medicaid fraud conviction. A lawyer for the Coulson family saw that window as a chance to serve him with a subpoena — to locate his assets and finally force payment on the $19 million judgment.
It didn’t work. A lobbyist Schwartz had hired — reportedly paying more than $1 million in lobbying fees to secure his federal pardon — also secured his early release from the Arkansas facility. He was gone before the family’s attorney could reach him.
A Pattern Investigators Say Was Widespread
The ProPublica report details case after case from states where Schwartz owned nursing homes: patients who suffered serious injuries from neglect, employees who bought food for residents out of their own paychecks, and workers who had insurance premiums deducted from their wages but never actually received coverage.
Prosecutors said Schwartz still had $58 million in assets — though none was reportedly held in his own name.
This pattern raises a broader question the industry has been grappling with: what happens when accountability structures fail entirely? Federal oversight of nursing home abuse has already been weakened in recent years, and civil judgments alone haven’t proven sufficient to make victims whole when operators structure their assets to avoid collection.
What This Means for the Industry
For nursing home operators and advocates, the Schwartz case is a cautionary tale about what happens when enforcement gaps compound over time. His facilities generated lawsuits in multiple states. He faced federal criminal charges. He was convicted. He was pardoned. And a grieving family is still waiting for a judgment a court handed them six years ago.
Amanda Coulson, the daughter who had watched her mother race alongside a patient’s bed doing CPR as a child — the daughter who brought the wrongful death case — has since died herself. The judgment remains unpaid.
The people who paid for the care are still paying.
