An agency nurse working the overnight shift at a Pennsylvania nursing home was found standing over an elderly, non-verbal resident with her fingers shoved in the woman’s mouth, insisting the resident had “demons” that needed to come out — and according to a Northampton County grand jury report, it took four separate 911 calls and more than thirty minutes before police could get to her. Octavia Lasha Robinson, 43, of Morristown, New Jersey, faces charges of abuse of a care-dependent person, simple assault and harassment over the June 23, 2025 incident at Gracedale Nursing Home, a county-owned facility in Nazareth.
Robinson was an agency licensed practical nurse who had been on the job for just twelve days when it happened. Court documents say Upper Nazareth Township police were dispatched to the facility around 3:22 a.m. after reports that Robinson had been alone in a resident’s room for roughly two hours and would not leave. When an officer finally reached the room, he found Robinson standing over the woman with her fingers in her mouth, saying there were demons inside the victim that needed to come out. Investigators say Robinson also stuffed clothing and towels into the resident’s throat and struck her repeatedly in the back.
What the grand jury found
Robinson was taken to Lehigh Valley Hospital for an involuntary psychiatric evaluation and was criminally charged after her release. She was arraigned before Magisterial District Judge Alicia Zito, posted $25,000 bail in July 2025, and is scheduled for trial on Oct. 5, 2026. None of the allegations against her have been proven in court.
A 44-page grand jury report released Sept. 10, 2026 went well beyond Robinson’s own conduct. It found that the four 911 calls made by the victim’s roommates during the assault went unanswered by facility staff for more than half an hour before officers arrived on their own. The report also detailed a documented pattern of chronic staffing shortages, security lapses and sanitation problems at Gracedale, and it tied those failures to a sharp rise in the facility’s Medicare inspection deficiency citations: three in 2023, two in 2024, and fourteen in 2025 — the year of the assault.
An unresolved question about the resident’s death
The resident Robinson is accused of assaulting died in the months that followed. A county detective told the grand jury that the Northampton County coroner had confirmed her death, but the report itself does not state a cause of death, and the grand jury did not draw a connection between the assault and that death. That distinction matters: Robinson has not been charged with any offense related to the resident’s death, only with the assault itself, and nothing in the public record establishes what caused it.
Twelve days on the job is not enough time for anyone to know a facility, let alone be trusted alone overnight with its most vulnerable residents — and that’s true whether the agency staffer is excellent or, as alleged here, a danger. What gets me about this one isn’t just the individual conduct; it’s that her own coworkers reportedly called 911 four times and still couldn’t get help there in under half an hour. If that’s accurate, the facility’s own emergency response failed a resident as badly as the nurse allegedly did. Staffing agencies exist because floors are short-staffed, not so buildings can skip knowing who they’ve let onto the unit.