A licensed practical nurse working a shift at a Manchester, New Jersey rehabilitation center pepper-sprayed an elderly dementia patient in the face at close range, sprayed him a second time as he tried to shield himself, then left him on the floor without care, according to a guilty plea entered before an Ocean County Superior Court judge. Lisa L. Erikson, 57, admitted to second-degree aggravated assault, third-degree possession of a weapon for an unlawful purpose, and third-degree neglect of an elderly adult over the March 19, 2025 incident at Whiting Gardens Rehabilitation and Nursing Center.
According to the New Jersey Attorney General's Office, Erikson was assigned to care for a resident living with dementia, depression and anxiety when she retrieved a personal canister of pepper spray — one she was never authorized to carry on the job — and used it on him twice at close range as he attempted to shield his face. Investigators say she then walked away and left him on the floor despite having a professional duty to care for him.
What she's losing
As part of her plea agreement, Erikson will permanently surrender the nursing license that let her work in long-term care. Prosecutors have agreed to recommend she serve 364 days in the Ocean County Jail as a condition of probation, rather than pursue the longer prison exposure the second-degree charge alone could carry — a structure New Jersey commonly uses to secure a guilty plea, a license surrender and a fixed jail term without a full trial. Superior Court Judge Kimarie Rahill is scheduled to formally sentence her Nov. 13.
The case is one of several caregiver-abuse prosecutions New Jersey's elder-abuse and Medicaid Fraud units have brought against long-term care staff this year. In a separate, unrelated case out of Camden County, a certified nurse's aide at a different facility admitted to spraying bleach in the face of a paralyzed nursing home resident, and is likewise scheduled to permanently forfeit her certification at an upcoming sentencing. Neither case is connected to the other beyond the state office that prosecuted both.
A pattern regulators say they're watching
Whiting Gardens Rehabilitation and Nursing Center, where Erikson worked, is a for-profit long-term care facility in Ocean County that has not been named as a defendant in the criminal case; the charges are against Erikson individually. New Jersey's nursing home oversight agencies have separately faced pressure in recent years over how quickly facilities report and act on suspected resident abuse by staff, after several cases in which internal complaints preceded a criminal charge by months. It is not publicly known whether Whiting Gardens received an internal complaint about Erikson before the March 2025 incident came to the state's attention.
Erikson's plea means the criminal case will not go to trial. Her sentencing hearing before Judge Rahill on Nov. 13 is expected to formalize both the license surrender and the negotiated 364-day jail term; New Jersey inmates serving county sentences of a year or less are generally not eligible for the state's standard "good time" credit programs that apply to state prison terms, meaning the negotiated number is close to the time prosecutors expect her to actually serve.
I've worked correctional health and long-term care both, and I won't pretend dementia patients can't be combative or genuinely exhausting to redirect safely — that's real, and it's exactly why facilities are supposed to train staff in de-escalation instead of leaving them to improvise. Reaching for a canister you brought from home, using it twice, and then walking away isn't a bad night on a hard unit. It's the kind of decision a state board can take a license away for, permanently, and here it did.