The footage shows Louise Harris screaming: ‘I hope you die in your sleep’
A carer was caught on camera abusing an 81-year-old woman with dementia. The family of the victim, Elizabeth Anne Shipton, have shared with WalesOnline their footage of the disturbing meltdown by carer Louise Harris, who drunkenly screamed at the pensioner: “I hope you die in your sleep you f***ing horrible cow.”
As Elizabeth lay in the bed of her Pontardawe home, Harris knelt down and put her arm on the elderly woman’s chest, demanding to know where her money was. Elizabeth complained the arm was hurting her but the carer yelled: “I don’t care, where’s your money?”
Last week at Swansea crown court the 42-year-old was jailed for three months, a sentence that the victim’s family believe should be significantly longer. Elizabeth is “horrifically traumatised” following her two-hour ordeal and her mental scars “will never go”, her daughter Tracy Faram told us.
Tracy has filed an appeal arguing the sentence was unduly lenient. She had known Harris, a former neighbour, for many years and had trusted her, never imagining she was capable of such cruelty.
“She’d been a carer since she was 18. I checked everything with her – she was trained on dementia, manual handling, incontinence. I’ll never get my head around how she could do this.”
Tracy had made the carer aware her mother was already in a fragile state having recently been in Morriston hospital for seven weeks with sepsis. She was also grieving the death of her husband whom she had been with since the age of 16.
“My mother had come out of hospital in December, my dad’s funeral was in January, and then this happened in February. Louise knew everything my mother was going through.
“I’d explained to her that knitting was the only thing helping my mother through the grief – it was giving her something to live for – and after I left the house Louise got drunk and ripped up my mother’s knitting. It was just cruel.”
While waiting for a care package to be put in place by social services, the family had advertised on Facebook for a sitter, which was answered by Harris. The abuse happened on the first and only occasion she cared for Elizabeth, whose family were treating it as a trial shift.
Tracy said: “She was meant to stay for four hours. I was there for the first hour and Louise seemed amazing. Almost as soon as I left she turned.”
After Tracy’s departure, Harris found a bottle of vodka in the fridge and downed it. The court later heard she was a recovering alcoholic who had “succumbed to temptation”.
Harris’ rage appeared to be sparked by Elizabeth accidentally pressing her Lifeline button, which triggered a phone call to a crisis response helpline.
This happens often, said Tracy, and the helpline operator quickly ended the call after Harris said everything was fine. But this innocuous moment seemed to infuriate Harris to the point she began screaming in the victim’s face.
The carer shouted that Elizabeth was “a horrible cow” and repeatedly hurled obscenities in a guttural scream at the top of her lungs.
At one point Harris went into the kitchen and waved a large kitchen knife around while trashing the property, the court heard.
Tracy was horrified when she accessed the security system’s camera to check how things were going, and witnessed Harris abusing her mum.
“The police had to break the door down because she’d been waving a knife,” said Tracy.
The court heard the inebriated carer was “slumped on the floor” when police entered the property.
Prosecutor Abud Hussain said the victim lay helpless in her bed thinking she was going to die. All she had wanted was to be left alone to sleep but instead Harris’ relentless aggression ruined her memories of her family home of some 60 years.
Harris, of Cwrt y Waun, Rhydyfro, Pontardawe, had no previous convictions. She pleaded guilty to being a care worker who ill-treated the victim and to criminal damage.
She had originally been charged with attempted robbery because of her demands about Elizabeth’s money, but the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) dropped that charge.
WalesOnline has seen a letter from the CPS explaining this decision was made because the CCTV did not show there had been “an application of force” when Harris put her arm on the victim and asked where her money was.
Tracy, who was outraged by this decision, said: “Louise’s arm was on my mum’s chest and she could be heard saying, ‘You are hurting me.’ It beggars belief that they couldn’t see any physical assault there.”
During the sentencing, Harris’ lawyer Andrew Evans said his client was genuinely remorseful for her “wholly unacceptable behaviour”, which he said was the result of her finding the vodka in the fridge.
Judge Huw Rees imposed a three-month jail term, of which 40% will be served in custody, a sentence that felt wholly inadequate to Tracy, although she said: “The judge’s hands were tied by the sentencing guidelines. You could see he was raging.
“For her to be serving just over a month is unbelievable when you think what we’ve had since February. We’ve been living this day in, day out, with my mother getting worse.
“Louise told my mum she lived up the road and would be coming back. My mum can’t be left on her own at all now. She keeps thinking Louise is going to come back and she has such vivid flashbacks that she’s been put on sedatives.
“The effect is my mum will not wear the Lifeline device because she thinks if she presses it the same thing will happen. We’ve had to fit a new front door with glass in the middle so she can see if someone is on the other side.
“I want to advocate for cameras in homes where there are carers, because what if we didn’t have this camera?”
Judge Rees said elderly people were entitled to be treated with “respect, dignity, and humanity” but that the defendant had been “heartless and cruel”, showing a “callous disregard” for her welfare.
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