New York Attorney General Letitia James has charged three staff members at a Herkimer County nursing home — including a registered nurse — after a resident with a documented, high-risk swallowing condition choked to death at the dinner table while, investigators say, she was left unsupervised and unassisted.
What investigators say happened
The charges, announced this month, stem from the August 23, 2025 death of a resident at The Grand at Mohawk Valley, a nursing home in Ilion, New York. According to the Attorney General's Office, the resident had a rare genetic condition that caused tumors throughout her body and made swallowing solid food difficult. She also had an eating disorder marked by insatiable hunger and compulsive eating, which investigators say put her at a known, high risk of choking — a risk the facility's own care plan was supposed to account for.
Investigators allege that dietary aide Mary Stocking, 74, was present when the resident began choking during a meal in the facility's dining hall and failed to intervene. A second staff member, nurse Mara Lasher, 33, is accused of ignoring the resident when she was found lying face down on a dining table. The facility's administrator, Michael Sutter, 42, allegedly ended the resident's close-supervision order two days before her death, despite knowing she was at high risk of choking.
The charges
All three defendants face felony charges of endangering the welfare of a vulnerable elderly, incompetent, or physically disabled person in the first degree, along with a misdemeanor count of willful violation of state health laws. Stocking faces the additional and most serious charge: manslaughter in the second degree. The case was brought by the Attorney General's Medicaid Fraud Control Unit, which investigates patient abuse and neglect at facilities that receive Medicaid funding.
None of the three has been convicted, and the allegations against them remain accusations at this stage of the case. Court records reviewed for this story do not yet reflect how each defendant has pleaded.
What's next
The Grand at Mohawk Valley has not issued a public statement responding to the charges as of publication. The case now moves through Herkimer County court, where a manslaughter charge against a nursing home employee — rather than the more common civil neglect lawsuit or licensing sanction — is itself unusual; most facility-death cases in New York are resolved through the Department of Health's survey process or wrongful-death litigation rather than a criminal indictment naming individual caregivers.
I've worked in a 142-bed skilled nursing facility for years, and the fact pattern here is the nightmare every MDS coordinator and floor nurse knows by name: a resident's care plan flags a specific, documented risk, someone with the authority to remove a safeguard removes it anyway, and then the staff on the floor are the ones left holding the consequences — and now, apparently, the criminal charges. If your facility has a close-supervision order on a resident's chart, that order exists because somebody already decided the risk was real. Don't let anyone talk you into treating it as optional, and if a supervision level gets downgraded, get the reasoning in writing before you sign off on the change.