A Fort Pierce nursing home patient’s dialysis catheter sat untouched for eight straight days in July 2024. Now three of the nurses who cared for him are facing felony neglect charges — and Florida court records say the paperwork shows they knew exactly what he needed.
Jennifer Sanon-Jules, 48, of New York; Nicole Chambers, 45, of Port St. Lucie; and Patricia Ann Summerssett, 36, also of Port St. Lucie, have each been charged with felony neglect of a vulnerable adult following an investigation by the Florida Attorney General’s Medicaid Fraud Control Unit. Sanon-Jules was arrested August 3, 2026; Chambers and Summerssett were arrested in May. A fourth nurse is named in the court records, though it is not clear whether she has also been arrested.
What court records say happened
The patient was admitted to Aviata at St. Lucie, a skilled nursing facility in Fort Pierce, on July 23, 2024, with standing physician orders for dialysis and a dialysis catheter already in place. His last actual treatment had been four days earlier, on July 20, at HCA Lawnwood Hospital.
Investigators say Sanon-Jules was the day-shift nurse on July 24, a scheduled dialysis day. She documented the catheter and obtained family consent for treatment — but never made sure the dialysis itself happened. Summerssett had the patient’s care on July 26, another scheduled day, and left no notes about dialysis at all. It wasn’t until July 29, when a certified nursing assistant flagged that the patient hadn’t been dialyzed in eight days, that Summerssett is said to have recognized how serious the situation had become.
By then the patient was too unstable to be dialyzed at the facility. He was transferred back to HCA Lawnwood for emergency hemodialysis and died there. Court records quote the standard investigators say every one of these nurses should have met: “a reasonable and prudent nurse encountering a patient with a dialysis catheter, dialysis physician orders, and a dialysis care plan would recognize dialysis as a critical life-sustaining treatment that must be performed on schedule.”
What gets me about this case isn’t that a treatment got missed once — it’s that it was documented, three separate times, by three separate nurses, without anyone escalating. Charting that a catheter is in place and that the family consented isn’t the same as confirming the order got carried out. If a scheduled treatment doesn’t happen on your shift, that’s not a footnote — it’s a phone call to the physician and a clear handoff to the next shift. Dialysis patients don’t have days to spare, and “I documented it” is not the same thing as “I made sure it happened.”
The charges, and what’s still unproven
All three nurses face felony neglect of a vulnerable adult charges. None has been convicted, and each is entitled to a full defense in court. The Attorney General’s Medicaid Fraud Control Unit, which investigates cases involving Medicaid-funded facilities, led the inquiry that produced the arrests. It is not yet clear whether the facility itself faces any separate licensing or civil action over the case.