Nurse’s ‘Demon’ Exorcism Triggered a Grand Jury Probe. The Patient Later Died.

A Pennsylvania grand jury says a nurse’s attempted “exorcism” of a bedridden nursing home resident was the incident that cracked open a far wider investigation into the county-run facility where it happened. Northampton County District Attorney Stephen Baratta presented the findings of the grand jury report at a news conference on Thursday, September 10th. The resident at the center of the case, who is not named in the report, died in the months that followed.

The case dates back to June 23, 2025, when Upper Nazareth Township police were called to Gracedale Nursing Home in Nazareth, Pennsylvania. Court documents cited by WFMZ say an officer found nurse Octavia Robinson, 43, of Morristown, New Jersey, standing over the patient with her fingers shoved in the resident’s mouth, saying there were “demons inside of the victim that needed to come out.”

The grand jury report identifies Robinson as an agency licensed practical nurse working the overnight shift, hired just twelve days before the incident. Robinson was charged with abuse of a care-dependent person, simple assault and harassment. She posted $25,000 bail in July 2025 and, according to court records, is scheduled for trial on October 5, 2026. None of those allegations have been proven in court. What the grand jury did next moved the story well past one nurse on one night shift, into findings that will sound familiar to anyone who has worked a short-staffed long-term care floor.

Want to see more Nurse.org articles in your Google results? Add us as a preferred source.

What the Grand Jury Says Happened That Night

The resident, identified in the report only as E.B., was an elderly hospice patient with an intellectual disability, bedridden and nonverbal. Her two roommates, also elderly, spent more than 30 minutes trying to summon help. One of them, identified as L.K., called 911 herself three times, at 2:53, 3:05 and 3:18 a.m., reporting that a nurse was trying to kill someone.

Each time, the 911 center contacted Gracedale’s nursing supervisors, who said someone would check or had already checked, and the responding officer closed the call without entering the building. On the third call, the report says, a supervisor told the dispatcher they would make contact with L.K. and “take her phone away or something.” It was a Gracedale supervisor who finally called 911 at 3:22 a.m. to request police. Officers were on scene at 3:27 a.m. and took Robinson into custody at 3:32 a.m., after she initially refused to step away from the resident.

“They discovered this nurse stuffing rags, and with her hands in the mouth of this elderly patient, there was blood on the patient. There was blood on the bedding,” Baratta said. Investigators also reported blood on the resident’s clothing and on towels discarded around the room, and NBC10 reports the grand jury found Robinson had also repeatedly struck the woman’s back. Robinson was transported to Lehigh Valley Hospital, where she was held for an involuntary psychiatric evaluation under Pennsylvania’s Section 302. Criminal charges were filed on her release.

A post shared by NBC10 Philadelphia (@nbcphiladelphia)

When an officer went back inside to interview staff, the report says, supervisors knew the nurse only as “Octavia.” No one knew her last name, and no one knew which agency employed her.

E.B. later died. A county detective told the grand jury in December 2025 that the Northampton County coroner had confirmed her death and that an autopsy with toxicology had been ordered. The report does not state a cause of death or connect it to the assault, and court records show the charges against Robinson remain unchanged as of publication.

Agency Staffing, Expired Food and a Spike in Deficiencies

Gracedale is the second largest governmentally owned nursing home in Pennsylvania, a 688-bed facility that serves medically complex and low-income residents of Northampton County. The grand jury found that staffing shortages have forced the county to cap admissions at 400 to 450 residents, and Medicare currently rates the facility one star out of five.

As of mid-2025, the grand jury found, only 25% of Gracedale’s nurse and nurse aide positions were filled by county employees, and agency staffing rose to an all-time high of 75% during the current administrator’s first eight months. A 2023 consultant report cited by the grand jury had already flagged the pattern, putting agency staff at 58% of registered nurses, 43% of LPNs and 56% of all direct care nursing at that time. The county disputes the current picture: the administrator’s lawyers wrote in a response attached to the report that agency use fell from about 80% in February 2025 to about 56%, and County Executive Tara Zrinski testified in April 2026 that the ratio of county to agency staff had improved to roughly 50-50.

Federal inspectors issued fourteen deficiency reports against Gracedale in 2025, up from two in 2024 and three in 2023, including failures in medication administration. The grand jury also described:

• Patient-on-patient assaults
• Residents wandering off unsupervised
• Staff sleeping at desks on shift
• Expired food
• Cross-contamination during meal service
• Deputy sheriff coverage that ran only from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. on weekdays and some weekends

Its recommendations include cutting reliance on agency workers, improving documentation and training, strengthening security, requiring in-person checks after any resident 911 call, creating a county liaison position and opening a separate review of how the Upper Nazareth Police Department handles Gracedale calls. The report notes the responding officer testified that he does not respond to most Gracedale calls, and that police were dispatched to the facility 1,600 times over a two-year period.

Upper Nazareth Police Chief William Cope, in a written statement released after the report, said the department has seen a significant increase in 911 calls from Gracedale. “Our officers are routinely being called upon to perform functions that are more appropriately handled by facility staff,” Cope said.

County Executive Zrinski announced a seven-point action plan that includes a new Director of Continuum of Care, Thomas Carson, plus recruitment and retention work aimed at reducing agency dependence. “Gracedale residents and their loved ones should never have to wonder whether the county government is listening, responding, and holding itself accountable, because we are,” Zrinski said.

The report became public over the county’s objections. Responses attached to the filed report show Zrinski wrote the supervising judge on June 30 asking that it be “quashed and/or sealed,” arguing the grand jury had exceeded its criminal-investigation mandate, and lawyers for Gracedale Administrator Michelle Morton wrote in August that the report “is not fully accurate” and should not be released. Former County Executive Lamont McClure, in his own attached response, called the report a “politically motivated hit job.” The Court of Common Pleas accepted it for public filing anyway.

Nurse.org will follow the case through Robinson’s trial and will report the coroner’s findings if they are released.

>>Listen to The Latest Nurse News Podcast

Strip away the word “exorcism” and this is a story about the systems that are supposed to catch a nurse in crisis before a patient gets hurt.

• An agency LPN, twelve days into the assignment, was reportedly alone in a room with a nonverbal resident for roughly two hours.
• A roommate called 911 three times over 25 minutes before a supervisor made the call that brought police through the door.
• Supervisors could not tell responding officers the nurse’s last name or her agency.

Every one of those is a failure point.

The agency staffing numbers are the part the grand jury pushed hardest on. Its report ties heavy agency reliance to “the proliferation of dangerous conditions,” and the logic will be familiar to bedside nurses: when three quarters of the direct care staff are contractors cycling through, the informal safety net that permanent staff build, knowing who is struggling, who is off that day, who needs a second set of eyes, does not form. The county rejects that causal link, and an outside reviewer cited in the administrator’s response found Gracedale followed its policies and could not have anticipated the incident. Both things can be true: a facility can pass its process review and still be a place where nobody knows the night nurse’s last name. One grand jury witness, a Gracedale nurse who testified anonymously, said Robinson was contracted through GHR Healthcare and claimed that neither GHR nor the agency that replaced it drug-tested nurses during hiring, testimony the agencies have not publicly answered.

Whatever a court ultimately decides about Robinson, hospital records obtained by investigators indicated an unspecified psychosis, and by all accounts in the report she had shown no signs of distress across roughly eight prior shifts. Nurses in acute crisis are often invisible until something catastrophic happens, in part because reporting a colleague can feel like ending their career. Facilities that make it safe to flag a coworker who is not okay catch these situations earlier.

The key takeaway for nurses: know your escalation path. If you report a resident safety concern and nothing moves internally, most states let you go straight to the state survey agency or the long-term care ombudsman. Document what you saw, when you reported it and to whom.

If you or a colleague are struggling, the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline (call or text 988) connects you with free, confidential support for any mental health crisis, and it is not limited to suicidal thoughts.

🤔 If you’ve worked a unit where most of the nurses were agency staff, would anyone have noticed a colleague spiraling for two hours? Tell us what your facility does when a nurse seems off.